SDDGR: Stable Diffusion-based Deep Generative Replay for Class Incremental Object Detection

In the field of class incremental learning (CIL), genera- tive replay has become increasingly prominent as a method to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting, alongside the con- tinuous improvements in generative models. However, its application in class incremental object detection (CIOD) has been significantly limited, primarily due to the com- plexities of scenes involving multiple labels. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called stable diffusion deep generative replay (SDDGR) for CIOD. Our method utilizes a diffusion-based generative model with pre-trained text- to-diffusion networks to generate realistic and diverse syn- thetic images. SDDGR incorporates an iterative refinement strategy to produce high-quality images encompassing old classes. Additionally, we adopt an L2 knowledge distilla- tion technique to improve the retention of prior knowledge in synthetic images. Furthermore, our approach includes pseudo-labeling for old objects within new task images, pre- venting misclassification as background elements. Exten- sive experiments on the COCO 2017 dataset demonstrate that SDDGR significantly outperforms existing algorithms, achieving a new state-of-the-art in various CIOD scenarios. The source code will be made available to the public.