The recently proposed end-to-end transformer detectors, such as DETR and Deformable DETR, have a cascade structure of stacking 6 decoder layers to update object queries iteratively, without which their performance degrades seriously. In this paper, we investigate that the random initialization of object containers, which include object queries and reference points, is mainly responsible for the requirement of multiple iterations. Based on our findings, we propose Efficient DETR, a simple and efficient pipeline for end-to-end object detection. By taking advantage of both dense detection and sparse set detection, Efficient DETR leverages dense prior to initialize the object containers and brings the gap of the 1-decoder structure and 6-decoder structure. Experiments conducted on MS COCO show that our method, with only 3 encoder layers and 1 decoder layer, achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art object detection methods. Efficient DETR is also robust in crowded scenes. It outperforms modern detectors on CrowdHuman dataset by a large margin.

本文提出使用密集先验初始化对象容器的方法，利用Efficient DETR同时利用密集检测和稀疏集检测，实现只有3个编码器层和1个解码器层的端到端物体检测，提高了算法效率和性能。在 MS COCO 数据集上的实验证明了该算法在拥挤场景下仍能稳定工作，并取得最先进算法相近的成绩，且在CrowdHuman数据集上表现优异。

高效DETR: 使用密集先验改进端到端目标检测器