Novel Instance Mining with Pseudo-Margin Evaluation for Few-Shot Object Detection

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) enables the detector to recognize novel objects only using limited training samples, which could greatly alleviate model’s dependency on data. Most existing methods include two training stages, namely base training and fine-tuning. However, the unlabeled novel instances in the base set were untouched in previous works, which can be re-used to enhance the FSOD performance. Thus, a new instance mining model is proposed in this paper to excavate the novel samples from the base set. The detector is thus fine-tuned again by these additional free novel instances. Meanwhile, a novel pseudo-margin evaluation algorithm is designed to address the quality problem of pseudo-labels brought by those new novel instances. The experimental results on MS-COCO dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed model, which does not require any additional training samples or parameters. Our code is available at: https://github.com/liuweijie19980216/NimPme.