A Lightweight Modular Framework for Low-Cost Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Training

Object detection is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, centered on recognizing objects within images, with diverse applications in areas like image analysis, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Although existing methods have achieved great success, they are often constrained by a fixed vocabulary of objects. To overcome this limitation, approaches like MDETR have redefined object detection by incorporating region-level vision-language pre-training, enabling open-vocabulary object detectors. However, these methods are computationally heavy due to the simultaneous training of large models for both vision and language representations. To address this, we introduce a lightweight framework that significantly reduces the number of parameters while preserving, or even improving, performance. Our solution is applied to MDETR, resulting in the development of Lightweight MDETR (LightMDETR), an optimized version of MDETR designed to enhance computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. The core of our approach involves freezing the MDETR backbone and training only the Universal Projection module (UP), which bridges vision and language representations. A learnable modality token parameter allows the UP to seamlessly switch between modalities. Evaluations on tasks like phrase grounding, referring expression comprehension, and segmentation show that LightMDETR not only reduces computational costs but also outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy.