System and method of incremental learning for object detection

Abstract

Methods and systems perform incremental learning object detection in images and/or videos without catastrophic forgetting of previously-learned object classes. A two-stage neural network object detector is trained to locate and identify objects pertaining to an additional object class by iteratively updating the two-stage neural network object detector until an overall detection accuracy criterion is met. The updating is performed so as to balance minimizing a loss of an initial ability to locate and identify objects pertaining to the previously-learned object classes and maximizing an ability to additionally locate and identify the objects pertaining to the additional object class. Assessing whether the overall detection accuracy criterion is met compares outputs of an initial version of the two-stage neural network object detector with a current region proposal output by a current version of the two-stage neural network object detector to determining a region proposal distillation loss and a previously-learned-object identification distillation loss.