Continual Universal Object Detection

Object detection has improved significantly in recent years on multiple challenging benchmarks. However, most existing detectors are still domain-specific, where the models are trained and tested on a single domain. When adapting these detectors to new domains, they often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of previous knowledge. In this paper, we propose a continual object detector that can learn sequentially from different domains without forgetting. First, we explore learning the object detector continually in different scenarios across various domains and categories. Learning from the analysis, we propose attentive feature distillation leveraging both bottom-up and top-down attentions to mitigate forgetting. It takes advantage of attention to ignore the noisy background information and feature distillation to provide strong supervision. Finally, for the most challenging scenarios, we propose an adaptive exemplar sampling method to leverage exemplars from previous tasks for less forgetting effectively. The experimental results show the excellent performance of our proposed method in three different scenarios across seven different object detection datasets.