Towards Few-Shot Open-Set Object Detection

Open-set object detection (OSOD) aims to detect the known categories and identify unknown objects in a dynamic world, which has achieved significant attentions. However, previous approaches only consider this problem in data-abundant conditions. We seek a solution for few-shot open-set object detection (FSOSOD), which aims to quickly train a detector based on few samples while detecting all known classes and identifying unknown classes. The main challenge for this task is that few training samples tend to overfit on the known classes, and lead to poor open-set performance. We propose a new FSOSOD algorithm to tackle this issue, named FOOD, which contains a novel class dropout cosine classifier (CDCC) and a novel unknown decoupling learner (UDL). To prevent over-fitting, CDCC randomly inactivates parts of the normalized neurons for the logit prediction of all classes, and then decreases the co-adaptability between the class and its neighbors. Alongside, UDL decouples training the unknown class and enables the model to form a compact unknown decision boundary. Thus, the unknown objects can be identified with a confidence probability without any pseudo-unknown samples for training. We compare our method with several state-of-the-art OSOD methods in few-shot scenes and observe that our method improves the recall of unknown classes by 5%-9% across all shots in VOC-COCO dataset setting.