Learning Background Prompts to Discover Implicit Knowledge for Open Vocabulary Object Detection
Authors: Jiaming Li, Jiacheng Zhang, Jichang Li, Ge Li, Si Liu, Liang Lin, Guanbin Li

Open vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims at seeking an optimal object detector capable of recognizing objects from both base and novel categories. Recent advances leverage knowledge distillation to transfer insightful knowledge from pre-trained large-scale vision-language models to the task of object detection significantly generalizing the powerful capabilities of the detector to identify more unknown object categories. However these methods face significant challenges in background interpretation and model overfitting and thus often result in the loss of crucial background knowledge giving rise to sub-optimal inference performance of the detector. To mitigate these issues we present a novel OVD framework termed LBP to propose learning background prompts to harness explored implicit background knowledge thus enhancing the detection performance w.r.t. base and novel categories. Specifically we devise three modules: Background Category-specific Prompt Background Object Discovery and Inference Probability Rectification to empower the detector to discover represent and leverage implicit object knowledge explored from background proposals. Evaluation on two benchmark datasets OV-COCO and OV-LVIS demonstrates the superiority of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art approaches in handling the OVD tasks.