OWL-ViT

The OWL-ViT (short for Vision Transformer for Open-World Localization) was proposed in Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers by Matthias Minderer, Alexey Gritsenko, Austin Stone, Maxim Neumann, Dirk Weissenborn, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Aravindh Mahendran, Anurag Arnab, Mostafa Dehghani, Zhuoran Shen, Xiao Wang, Xiaohua Zhai, Thomas Kipf, and Neil Houlsby.

OWL-ViT is an open-vocabulary object detection network trained on a variety of (image, text) pairs. It can be used to query an image with one or multiple text queries to search for and detect target objects described in text.

Intended Use

OWL-ViT is a zero-shot text-conditioned object detection model. OWL-ViT uses CLIP as its multi-modal backbone, with a ViT-like Transformer to get visual features and a causal language model to get the text features. To use CLIP for detection, OWL-ViT removes the final token pooling layer of the vision model and attaches a lightweight classification and box head to each transformer output token. Open-vocabulary classification is enabled by replacing the fixed classification layer weights with the class-name embeddings obtained from the text model. The authors first train CLIP from scratch and fine-tune it end-to-end with the classification and box heads on standard detection datasets using a bipartite matching loss. One or multiple text queries per image can be used to perform zero-shot text-conditioned object detection.

Performance

OWL-ViT achieves zero-shot detection results competitive with much more complex approaches on the challenging LVIS benchmark and outperforms pre-existing methods on image-conditioned detection by a large margin.