PseDet: Revisiting the Power of Pseudo Label in Incremental Object Detection

Incremental Objection Detection (IOD) facilitates the expansion of the usage scope of object detectors without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Current approaches mostly adopt response-level knowledge distillation to overcome forgetting issues, by conducting implicit memory replay from the teacher model on new training data. However, this indirect learning paradigm does not fully leverage the knowledge generated by the teacher model. In this paper, we dive deeper into the mechanism of pseudo-labeling in incremental object detection by investigating three critical problems: (a) the upper bound quality of the pseudo labels is greatly limited by the previous model, (b) fixed score thresholds for label filtering, without considering the distribution across categories, and (c) the confidence score generated by the model does not well reflect the quality of the localization. Based on these observations, we propose a simple yet effective pseudo-labeling continual object detection framework, namely PseDet. Specifically, we introduce the spatio-temporal enhancement module to alleviate the negative effects when learning noisy data from the previous model. Considering the score distribution divergence across different classes, we propose the Categorical Adaptive Label Selector with a simple mathematical prior and fast K-Means pre-computation to dynamically determine the class-wise filtering threshold. In order to align the label score with the localization quality of the pseudo labels, we project the score through non-linear mapping to calibrate the distribution and integrate it into the new-step supervision. Extensive experiments on the competitive COCO benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of PseDet. Notably, it achieves 43.5+/41.2+ mAP under the 1/4-step incremental settings, achieving new state-of-the-art performance.