ZeBROD: Zero-Retraining Based Recognition and Object Detection Framework
This addresses the problem of frequent retraining costs for object detection models in domains like retail checkout, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing components.
The paper tackles catastrophic forgetting in object detection by proposing ZeBROD, a zero-retraining framework that combines YOLO11n, DeIT, and metric learning. In a retail case study with 140 products, it achieved competitive accuracy and nearly 3× faster training time efficiency compared to classical approaches.
Object detection constitutes the primary task within the domain of computer vision. It is utilized in numerous domains. Nonetheless, object detection continues to encounter the issue of catastrophic forgetting. The model must be retrained whenever new products are introduced, utilizing not only the new products dataset but also the entirety of the previous dataset. The outcome is obvious: increasing model training expenses and significant time consumption. In numerous sectors, particularly retail checkout, the frequent introduction of new products presents a great challenge. This study introduces Zero-Retraining Based Recognition and Object Detection (ZeBROD), a methodology designed to address the issue of catastrophic forgetting by integrating YOLO11n for object localization with DeIT and Proxy Anchor Loss for feature extraction and metric learning. For classification, we utilize cosine similarity between the embedding features of the target product and those in the Qdrant vector database. In a case study conducted in a retail store with 140 products, the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves encouraging accuracy, whether for detecting new or existing products. Furthermore, without retraining, the training duration difference is significant. We achieve almost 3 times the training time efficiency compared to classical object detection approaches. This efficiency escalates as additional new products are added to the product database. The average inference time is 580 ms per image containing multiple products, on an edge device, validating the proposed framework's feasibility for practical use.