Prompt-Guided Transformers for End-to-End Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Abstract

Prompt-OVD is an efficient and effective framework for open-vocabulary object detection that utilizes class embeddings from CLIP as prompts, guiding the Transformer decoder to detect objects in both base and novel classes. Additionally, our novel RoI-based masked attention and RoI pruning techniques help leverage the zero-shot classification ability of the Vision Transformer-based CLIP, resulting in improved detection performance at minimal computational cost. Our experiments on the OV-COCO and OVLVIS datasets demonstrate that Prompt-OVD achieves an impressive 21.2 times faster inference speed than the first end-to-end open-vocabulary detection method (OV-DETR), while also achieving higher APs than four two-stage-based methods operating within similar inference time ranges. Code will be made available soon.