DECO: Unleashing the Potential of ConvNets for Query-based Detection and Segmentation
This work addresses the need for efficient and simple architectures in computer vision, offering an incremental alternative to transformer-based methods for detection and segmentation tasks.
The paper tackles the problem of building a query-based detection and segmentation framework using pure convolutional networks (ConvNets) instead of transformers, proposing DECO which achieves competitive performance on COCO with 40.5% AP at 66 FPS for ResNet-18 and 47.8% AP at 34 FPS for ResNet-50.
Transformer and its variants have shown great potential for various vision tasks in recent years, including image classification, object detection and segmentation. Meanwhile, recent studies also reveal that with proper architecture design, convolutional networks (ConvNets) also achieve competitive performance with transformers. However, no prior methods have explored to utilize pure convolution to build a Transformer-style Decoder module, which is essential for Encoder-Decoder architecture like Detection Transformer (DETR). To this end, in this paper we explore whether we could build query-based detection and segmentation framework with ConvNets instead of sophisticated transformer architecture. We propose a novel mechanism dubbed InterConv to perform interaction between object queries and image features via convolutional layers. Equipped with the proposed InterConv, we build Detection ConvNet (DECO), which is composed of a backbone and convolutional encoder-decoder architecture. We compare the proposed DECO against prior detectors on the challenging COCO benchmark. Despite its simplicity, our DECO achieves competitive performance in terms of detection accuracy and running speed. Specifically, with the ResNet-18 and ResNet-50 backbone, our DECO achieves $40.5\%$ and $47.8\%$ AP with $66$ and $34$ FPS, respectively. The proposed method is also evaluated on the segment anything task, demonstrating similar performance and higher efficiency. We hope the proposed method brings another perspective for designing architectures for vision tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/DECO and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/DECO.