Zero-Shot Detection
This addresses the challenge of large-scale object detection where annotated data for all classes is unavailable, though it is incremental as it builds on YOLOv2.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting unseen object classes without annotated training data by proposing a zero-shot method that fuses semantic attribute prediction with visual features, resulting in significant improvements in average precision for unseen classes on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets.
As we move towards large-scale object detection, it is unrealistic to expect annotated training data, in the form of bounding box annotations around objects, for all object classes at sufficient scale, and so methods capable of unseen object detection are required. We propose a novel zero-shot method based on training an end-to-end model that fuses semantic attribute prediction with visual features to propose object bounding boxes for seen and unseen classes. While we utilize semantic features during training, our method is agnostic to semantic information for unseen classes at test-time. Our method retains the efficiency and effectiveness of YOLOv2 for objects seen during training, while improving its performance for novel and unseen objects. The ability of state-of-art detection methods to learn discriminative object features to reject background proposals also limits their performance for unseen objects. We posit that, to detect unseen objects, we must incorporate semantic information into the visual domain so that the learned visual features reflect this information and leads to improved recall rates for unseen objects. We test our method on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO dataset and observed significant improvements on the average precision of unseen classes.