Object-Conditioned Bag of Instances for Few-Shot Personalized Instance Recognition

Nowadays, users demand for increased personalization of vision systems to localize and identify personal instances of objects (e.g., my dog rather than dog) from a few-shot dataset only. Despite outstanding results of deep networks on classical label-abundant benchmarks (e.g., those of the latest YOLOv8 model for standard object detection), they struggle to maintain within-class variability to represent different instances rather than object categories only. We construct an Object-conditioned Bag of Instances (OBoI) based on multiorder statistics of extracted features, where generic object detection models are extended to search and identify personal instances from the OBoI’s metric space, without need for backpropagation. By relying on multi-order statistics, OBoI achieves consistent superior accuracy in distinguishing different instances. In the results, we achieve 77.1% personal object recognition accuracy in case of 18 personal instances, showing about 12% relative gain over the state of the art.