DDOWOD: DiffusionDet for open-world object detection

Open-world object detection (OWOD) poses a significant challenge in computer vision, requiring models to detect unknown objects and incrementally learn new categories. To explore this field, we propose the DDOWOD based on the DiffusionDet. It is more likely to cover unknown objects hidden in the background and can reduce the model’s bias towards known class objects during training due to its ability to randomly generate boxes and reconstruct the characteristics of the GT from them. Also, to improve the insufficient quality of pseudo-labels which leads to reduced accuracy in recognizing unknown classes, we use the Segment Anything Model (SAM) as the teacher model in distillation learning to endow DDOWOD with rich visual knowledge. Surprisingly, compared to other existing models, our DDOWOD is more suitable for using SAM as the teacher. Furthermore, we proposed the Stepwise distillation (SD) which is a new incremental learning method specialized for our DDOWOD to avoid catastrophic forgetting during the training. Our approach utilizes all previously trained models from past tasks rather than solely relying on the last one. DDOWOD has achieved excellent performance. U-Recall is 53.2, 51.5, 50.7 in OWOD split and U-AP is 21.9 in IntensiveSet.