Comparison Detector: A novel object detection method for small dataset

Though the object detection has shown great success when the training set is sufficient, there is a serious shortage of generalization in the small dataset scenario. However, we inevitably just get a small one in some application scenarios, especially medicine. In this paper, we propose Comparison detector which still maintains the end-to-end fashion in training and testing, surpassing the state-of-the-art two-stage object detection model on the small dataset. Inspired by one/few-shot learning, we replace the parameter classifier in feature pyramid network(FPN) with the comparison classifier in no-parameters or semi-parameters manner. In fact, a stronger inductive bias is added to the model to simplify the problem and reduce the dependence of data. The performance of our model is evaluated on the cervical cancer pathology test set. When training on the small dataset, it achieves a mAP 26.3% and an AR 35.7%, both improving about 20 points compared to baseline model. Moreover, Comparison detector achieves same mAP performance as the current state-of-the-art model when training on the medium dataset, and improves AR by 4 points. Our method is promising for the development of object detection in small dataset scenario.