IP Library › Granted Patent US 12,198,453
Granted Patent B2
US 12,198,453 · App. 17/587,161 · Granted Jan 14, 2025

Systems and methods for open vocabulary object detection

Inventors: Mingfei Gao (Sunnyvale, CA); Chen Xing (Palo Alto, CA)
Assignee: Salesforce, Inc.
G06V20/635G06F40/126G06T1/60G06T9/00G06V10/225G06V10/7715G06V10/7747
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Quick Facts
Patent No.
US 12,198,453
App. No.
17/587,161
Granted
Jan 14, 2025
Kind
B2
Abstract

Embodiments described herein provide methods and systems for open vocabulary object detection of images. given a pre-trained vision-language model and an image-caption pair, an activation map may be computed in the image that corresponds to an object of interest mentioned in the caption. The activation map is then converted into a pseudo bounding-box label for the corresponding object category. The open vocabulary detector is then directly supervised by these pseudo box-labels, which enables training object detectors with no human-provided bounding-box annotations.

Claims (49)

1. A method for object detection within an image, the method comprising:

obtaining, via a data interface, the image having one or more regions and a caption associated with the image;

encoding, by an image encoder, the image into a visual embedding;

encoding, by a text encoder, at least one word from the caption into a text embedding;

generating, via a cross-attention layer, multimodal features of the image and the word by applying cross-attention between the visual embedding and the text embedding;

computing an activation map based on a gradient of a scalar that represents a similarity between the image and the caption with respect to cross-attention scores of the cross-attention layer;

determining a bounding-box annotation of the word based on the activation map; and

incorporating the bounding-box annotation with the image as a training image sample in a training dataset.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein computing the activation map comprises averaging values from all attention heads of the cross-attention layer.

3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

training an open vocabulary object detector using the training dataset comprising the bounding-box annotation with the image.

4. The method of claim 3 , further comprising:

fine-tuning the open vocabulary object detector using categories trained with human-annotated bounding-boxes.

5. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

determining the bounding-box annotation based on an overlap between a proposed bounding-box and a relevant region of the activation map.

6. The method of claim 5 , wherein the proposed bounding-box is generated by a pre-trained proposal generator without reference to the caption.

7. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

training a machine learning model for object detection based on the training image sample having the bounding-box annotation as a ground truth.

8. A system for object detection within an image, the system comprising:

a memory that stores a dialogue structure extraction model;

a communication interface that obtains the image having one or more regions and a caption associated with the image; and

one or more hardware processors that:

encodes, by an image encoder, the image into a visual embedding;

encodes, by a text encoder, at least one word from the caption into a text embedding;

generates, via a cross-attention layer, multimodal features of the image and the word by applying cross-attention between the visual embedding and the text embedding;

computes an activation map based on a gradient of a scalar that represents a similarity between the image and the caption with respect to cross-attention scores of the cross-attention layer;

determines a bounding-box annotation of the word based on the activation map; and

incorporates the bounding-box annotation with the image as a training image sample in a training dataset.

9. The system of claim 8 , wherein the one or more hardware processors computes the activation map by averaging values from all attention heads of the cross-attention layer.

10. The system of claim 8 , wherein the one or more hardware processors further:

trains an open vocabulary object detector using the training dataset comprising the bounding-box annotation with the image.

11. The system of claim 10 , wherein the one or more hardware processors further:

fine-tunes the open vocabulary object detector using categories trained with human-annotated bounding-boxes.

12. The system of claim 8 , wherein the one or more hardware processors further:

determines the bounding-box annotation based on an overlap between a proposed bounding-box and a relevant region of the activation map.

13. The system of claim 12 , wherein the one or more hardware processors generates the proposed bounding-box by a pre-trained proposal generator without reference to the caption.

14. The system of claim 8 , wherein the one or more hardware processors further:

trains a machine learning model for object detection based on the training image sample having the bounding-box annotation as a ground truth.

15. A processor-readable non-transitory storage medium storing a plurality of processor-executable instructions for object detection within an image, the instructions being executed by a processor to perform operations comprising:

obtaining, via a data interface, the image having one or more regions and a caption associated with the image;

encoding, by an image encoder, the image into a visual embedding;

encoding, by a text encoder, at least one word from the caption into a text embedding;

generating, via a cross-attention layer, multimodal features of the image and the word by applying cross-attention between the visual embedding and the text embedding;

computing an activation map based on a gradient of a scalar that represents a similarity between the image and the caption with respect to cross-attention scores of the cross-attention layer;

determining a bounding-box annotation of the word based on the activation map; and

incorporating the bounding-box annotation with the image as a training image sample in a training dataset.

16. The processor-readable non-transitory storage medium of claim 15 , wherein computing the activation map comprises averaging values from all attention heads of the cross-attention layer.

17. The processor-readable non-transitory storage medium of claim 15 , the instructions being executed by the processor to perform operations further comprising:

training an open vocabulary object detector using the training dataset comprising the bounding-box annotation with the image.

Assignments (2)
CHANGE OF NAME Recorded Aug 4, 2026
From: SALESFORCE.COM, INC.
To: SALESFORCE, INC.
Reel/Frame 076118/0548 →
ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNOR'S INTEREST Recorded Mar 25, 2022
From: GAO, MINGFEI; XING, CHEN
To: SALESFORCE.COM, INC.
Reel/Frame 059405/0485 →
Continuity (2)
Provisional Application 63280072 · Nov 16, 2021
Related Publication 20230154213A1 · May 18, 2023
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