Open-Vocabulary Object Detection With an Open Corpus

Existing open vocabulary object detection (OVD) works expand the object detector toward open categories by replacing the classifier with the category text embeddings and optimizing the region-text alignment on data of the base categories. However, both the class-agnostic proposal generator and the classifier are biased to the seen classes as demonstrated by the gaps of objectness and accuracy assessment between base and novel classes. In this paper, an open corpus, composed of a set of external object concepts and clustered to several centroids, is introduced to improve the generalization ability in the detector. We propose the generalized objectness assessment (GOAT) in the proposal generator based on the visual-text alignment, where the similarities of visual feature to the cluster centroids are summarized as the objectness. This simple heuristic evaluates objectness with concepts in open corpus and is thus generalized to open categories. We further propose category expanding (CE) with open corpus in two training tasks, which enables the detector to perceive more categories in the feature space and get more reasonable optimization direction. For the classification task, we introduce an open corpus classifier by reconstructing original classifier with similar words in text space. For the image-caption alignment task, the open corpus centroids are incorporated to enlarge the negative samples in the contrastive loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GOAT and CE, which greatly improve the performance on novel classes and get new state-of-the-art on the OVD benchmarks.