Cascade-DETR: Delving into High-Quality Universal Object Detection
Mingqiao Ye Lei Ke Siyuan Li Yu-Wing Tai Chi-Keung Tang Martin Danelljan Fisher Yu
Object localization in general environments is a fundamental part of vision
systems. While dominating on the COCO benchmark, recent Transformer-based
detection methods are not competitive in diverse domains. Moreover, these
methods still struggle to very accurately estimate the object bounding boxes in
complex environments.
  We introduce Cascade-DETR for high-quality universal object detection. We
jointly tackle the generalization to diverse domains and localization accuracy
by proposing the Cascade Attention layer, which explicitly integrates
object-centric information into the detection decoder by limiting the attention
to the previous box prediction. To further enhance accuracy, we also revisit
the scoring of queries. Instead of relying on classification scores, we predict
the expected IoU of the query, leading to substantially more well-calibrated
confidences. Lastly, we introduce a universal object detection benchmark,
UDB10, that contains 10 datasets from diverse domains. While also advancing the
state-of-the-art on COCO, Cascade-DETR substantially improves DETR-based
detectors on all datasets in UDB10, even by over 10 mAP in some cases. The
improvements under stringent quality requirements are even more pronounced. Our
code and models will be released at https://github.com/SysCV/cascade-detr.