iFS-RCNN: An Incremental Few-shot Instance Segmenter

• Published in: 2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) pp. 7000 - 7009
• Main Authors: Nguyen, Khoi, Todorovic, Sinisa
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2022
• Subjects: categorization; Computer vision; grouping and shape analysis; Measurement; Pattern recognition; Performance gain; retrieval; Segmentation; Shape; Training; Transfer/low-shot/long-tail learning; Recognition: detection; Uncertainty
• ISSN: 2575-7075
• DOI: 10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.00688

This paper addresses incremental few-shot instance seg-mentation, where a few examples of new object classes ar-rive when access to training examples of old classes is not available anymore, and the goal is to perform well on both old and new classes. We make two contributions by extending the common Mask-RCNN framework in its second stage - namely, we specify a new object class classifier based on the probit function and a new uncertainty-guided bounding-box predictor. The former leverages Bayesian learning to address a paucity of training examples of new classes. The latter learns not only to predict object bounding boxes but also to estimate the uncertainty of the prediction as a guid-ance for bounding box refinement. We also specify two new loss functions in terms of the estimated object-class distribution and bounding-box uncertainty. Our contributions produce significant performance gains on the COCO dataset over the state of the art - specifically, the gain of +6 on the new classes and +16 on the old classes in the AP instance segmentation metric. Furthermore, we are the first to evaluate the incremental few-shot setting on the more challenging LVIS dataset.