Beyond Proposals: Region-Consistent Open-Set Object Detection

Abstract

Open-set object detection (OSOD) suffers from a fundamental limitation under dense proposal mechanisms: highly overlapping proposals associated with the same object are often assigned contradictory known/unknown predictions. Existing methods perform open-set reasoning independently for each proposal, while ignoring the shared semantics among correlated proposals, resulting in fragmented detections and unstable open-set decisions. In this paper, we reformulate OSOD as an object-centric semantic inference problem, where correlated proposals jointly support a coherent region-level semantic decision. Based on this perspective, we propose OCSI-Net, a unified framework that combines object-centric semantic consistency with geometry-aware uncertainty stabilization. Specifically, OCSI-Net aggregates correlated proposals into structured region clusters and infers region-level semantics from aggregated semantic evidence, thereby enforcing coherent open-set predictions within the same object region. Furthermore, a geometry-aware uncertainty mechanism is introduced to stabilize optimization near open-set transition boundaries. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that OCSI-Net consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving the harmonic mean of known and unknown detection by an average of 6.83\% over the second-best method.