Dense Relation Distillation with Context-aware Aggregation for Few-Shot Object Detection, CVPR 2021

Our code is based on https://github.com/facebookresearch/maskrcnn-benchmark and developed with Python 3.6.5 & PyTorch 1.1.0.

Abstract

Conventional deep learning based methods for object detection require a large amount of bounding box annotations for training, which is expensive to obtain such high quality annotated data. Few-shot object detection, which learns to adapt to novel classes with only a few annotated examples, is very challenging since the fine-grained feature of novel object can be easily overlooked with only a few data available. In this work, aiming to fully exploit features of annotated novel object and capture fine-grained features of query object, we propose Dense Relation Distillation with Context-aware Aggregation (DCNet) to tackle the few-shot detection problem. Built on the meta-learning based framework, Dense Relation Distillation module targets at fully exploiting support features, where support features and query feature are densely matched, covering all spatial locations in a feed-forward fashion. The abundant usage of the guidance information endows model the capability to handle common challenges such as appearance changes and occlusions. Moreover, to better capture scale-aware features, Context-aware Aggregation module adaptively harnesses features from different scales for a more comprehensive feature representation. Extensive experiments illustrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets. For more details, please refer to our CVPR paper (arxiv).

Installation

Check INSTALL.md for installation instructions. Since maskrcnn-benchmark has been deprecated, please follow these instructions carefully (e.g. version of Python packages).

Prepare datasets

Prepare original Pascal VOC & MS COCO datasets

First, you need to download the VOC & COCO datasets. We recommend to symlink the path of the datasets to datasets/ as follows

We use minival and valminusminival sets from Detectron (filelink).

mkdir -p datasets/coco
ln -s /path_to_coco_dataset/annotations datasets/coco/annotations
ln -s /path_to_coco_dataset/train2014 datasets/coco/train2014
ln -s /path_to_coco_dataset/test2014 datasets/coco/test2014
ln -s /path_to_coco_dataset/val2014 datasets/coco/val2014

ln -s /path_to_VOCdevkit_dir datasets/voc

Prepare base and few-shot datasets

For multiple runs, you need to specify the seed in the script.

bash tools/fewshot_exp/datasets/init_fs_dataset_standard.sh

This will also generate the datasets on base classes for base training.

Training and Evaluation

Scripts for training and evaluation on PASCAL VOC dataset.

experiments/DRD/
├── prepare_dataset.sh
├── base_train.sh
├── fine_tune.sh
└── get_result.sh

Configurations of base & few-shot experiments are:

experiments/DRD/configs/
├── base
│   └── e2e_voc_split*_base.yaml
└── standard
    └── e2e_voc_split*_*shot_finetune.yaml

Modify them if needed. If you have any question about these parameters (e.g. batchsize), please refer to maskrcnn-benchmark for quick solutions.

Perform few-shot training on VOC dataset

1. Run the following for base training on 3 VOC splits

cd experiments/DRD
bash base_train.sh

This will generate base models (e.g. model_voc_split1_base.pth) and corresponding pre-trained models (e.g. voc0712_split1base_pretrained.pth).

2. Run the following for few-shot fine-tuning

bash fine_tune.sh

This will perform evaluation on 1/2/3/5/10 shot of 3 splits. Result folder is fs_exp/voc_standard_results by default, and you can get a quick summary by:

bash get_result.sh

Citation

@inproceedings{hu2021dense,
  title={Dense Relation Distillation with Context-aware Aggregation for Few-Shot Object Detection},
  author={Hu, Hanzhe and Bai, Shuai and Li, Aoxue and Cui, Jinshi and Wang, Liwei},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  pages={10185--10194},
  year={2021}
}

TODO

• [ ] Context-aware Aggregation
• [ ] Training scripts on COCO dataset