Abstract
Existing object detection methods typically rely on the availability of abundant labelled training samples per class and offline model training in a batch mode. These requirements substantially limit their scalability to open-ended accommodation of novel classes with limited labelled training data, both in terms of model accuracy and training efficiency during deployment. We present the first study aiming to go beyond these limitations by considering the Incremental Few-Shot Detection (iFSD) problem setting, where new classes must be registered incrementally (without revisiting base classes) and with few examples. To this end we propose OpeN-ended Centre nEt (ONCE), a detector designed for incrementally learning to detect novel class objects with few examples. This is achieved by an elegant adaptation of the efficient CentreNet detector to the few-shot learning scenario, and meta-learning a class-wise code generator model for registering novel classes. ONCE fully respects the incremental learning paradigm, with novel class registration requiring only a single forward pass of few-shot training samples, and no access to base classes - thus making it suitable for deployment on embedded devices, etc. Extensive experiments conducted on both the standard object detection (COCO, PASCAL VOC) and fashion landmark detection (DeepFashion2) tasks show the feasibility of iFSD for the first time, opening an interesting and very important line of research.