MM-FSOD: Meta and metric integrated few-shot object detection

In the object detection task, CNN (Convolutional neural networks) models always need a large amount of annotated examples in the training process. To reduce the dependency of expensive annotations, few-shot object detection has become an increasing research focus. In this paper, we present an effective object detection framework (MM-FSOD) that integrates metric learning and meta-learning to tackle the few-shot object detection task. Our model is a class-agnostic detection model that can accurately recognize new categories, which are not appearing in training samples. Specifically, to fast learn the features of new categories without a fine-tuning process, we propose a meta-representation module (MR module) to learn intra-class mean prototypes. MR module is trained with a meta-learning method to obtain the ability to reconstruct high-level features. To further conduct similarity of features between support prototype with query RoIs features, we propose a Pearson metric module (PR module) which serves as a classifier. Compared to the previous commonly used metric method, cosine distance metric. PR module enables the model to align features into discriminative embedding space. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets FSOD, MS COCO, and PASCAL VOC to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our model. Comparing with the previous method, MM-FSOD achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results.