Deep Feature Deblurring Diffusion for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Objects

To promote the safe application of detectors, a task of unsupervised out-of-distribution object detection (OOD-OD) is recently proposed, whose goal is to detect unseen OOD objects without accessing any auxiliary OOD data. For this task, the challenge mainly lies in how to only leverage the known in-distribution (ID) data to detect OOD objects accurately without affecting the detection of ID objects, which can be framed as the diffusion problem for deep feature synthesis. Accordingly, such challenge could be addressed by the forward and reverse processes in the diffusion model. In this paper, we propose a new approach of Deep Feature Deblurring Diffusion (DFDD), consisting of forward blurring and reverse deblurring processes. Specifically, the forward process gradually performs Gaussian Blur on the extracted features, which is instrumental in retaining sufficient input-relevant information. By this way, the forward process could synthesize virtual OOD features that are close to the classification boundary between ID and OOD objects, which improves the performance of detecting OOD objects. During the reverse process, based on the blurred features, a dedicated deblurring model is designed to continually recover the lost details in the forward process. Both the deblurred features and original features are taken as the input for training, strengthening the discrimination ability. In the experiments, our method is evaluated on OOD-OD, open-set object detection, and incremental object detection. The significant performance gains over baselines demonstrate the superiorities of our method. The source code will be made available at: https://github.com/AmingWu/DFDD-OOD.