GFENet: Generalization Feature Extraction Network for Few-Shot Object Detection

Few-shot object detection achieves rapid detection of novel-class objects by training detectors with a minimal number of novel-class annotated instances. Transfer learning-based few-shot object detection methods have shown better performance compared to other methods such as meta-learning. However, when training with base-class data, the model may gradually bias towards learning the characteristics of each category in the base-class data, which could result in a decrease in learning ability during fine-tuning on novel classes, and further overfitting due to data scarcity. In this paper, we first find that the generalization performance of the base-class model has a significant impact on novel class detection performance and proposes a generalization feature extraction network framework to address this issue. This framework perturbs the base model during training to encourage it to learn generalization features and solves the impact of changes in object shape and size on overall detection performance, improving the generalization performance of the base model. Additionally, we propose a feature-level data augmentation method based on self-distillation to further enhance the overall generalization ability of the model. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the COCO and PASCAL VOC datasets, with a 6.94% improvement on the PASCAL VOC 10-shot dataset.