Decoupled PROB: Decoupled Query Initialization Tasks and Objectness-Class Learning for Open World Object Detection

Abstract: Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a challenging computer vision task that extends standard object detection by (1) detecting and classifying unknown objects without supervision, and (2) incrementally learning new object classes without forgetting previously learned ones. The absence of ground truths for unknown objects makes OWOD tasks particularly challenging. Many methods have addressed this by using pseudo-labels for unknown objects. The recently proposed Probabilistic Objectness transformer-based open-world detector (PROB) is a state-of-the-art model that does not require pseudo-labels for unknown objects, as it predicts probabilistic objectness. However, this method faces issues with learning conflicts between objectness and class predictions. To address this issue and further enhance performance, we propose a novel model, Decoupled PROB. Decoupled PROB introduces Early Termination of Objectness Prediction (ETOP) to stop objectness predictions at appropriate layers in the decoder, resolving the learning conflicts between class and objectness predictions in PROB. Additionally, we introduce Task-Decoupled Query Initialization (TDQI), which efficiently extracts features of known and unknown objects, thereby improving performance. TDQI is a query initialization method that combines query selection and learnable queries, and it is a module that can be easily integrated into existing DETR-based OWOD models. Extensive experiments on OWOD benchmarks demonstrate that Decoupled PROB surpasses all existing methods across several metrics, significantly improving performance.