Sai Saketh Rambhatla, Ishan Misra, Rama Chellappa, Abhinav Shrivastava

This is the official repository for the work MOST:Multiple Object localization using Self-supervised Transformers for object discovery, accepted as an Oral at ICCV 2023, see Project Page.

We tackle the challenging task of unsupervised object localization in this work. Recently, transformers trained with self-supervised learning have been shown to exhibit object localization properties without being trained for this task. In this work, we present Multiple Object localization with Self-supervised Transformers (MOST) that uses features of transformers trained using self-supervised learning to localize multiple objects in real world images. MOST analyzes the similarity maps of the features using box counting; a fractal analysis tool to identify tokens lying on foreground patches. The identified tokens are then clustered together, and tokens of each cluster are used to generate bounding boxes on foreground regions. Unlike recent state-of-the-art object localization methods, MOST can localize multiple objects per image and outperforms SOTA algorithms on several object localization and discovery benchmarks on PASCAL-VOC 07, 12 and COCO20k datasets. Additionally, we show that MOST can be used for self-supervised pre-training of object detectors, and yields consistent improvements on fully, semi-supervised object detection and unsupervised region proposal generation.

• This code was tested using Python3.7

We recommend using conda to create a new environment.

conda create -n most python=3.7

Then activate the virtual environment

conda activate most

Install Pytorch 1.7.1 (CUDA 10.2)

conda install pytorch==1.7.1 torchvision==0.8.2 torchaudio==0.7.2 cudatoolkit=10.2 -c pytorch

• Install other requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Install DINO

git clone https://github.com/facebookresearch/dino.git
cd dino; 
touch __init__.py
echo -e "import sys\nfrom os.path import dirname, join\nsys.path.insert(0, join(dirname(__file__), '.'))" >> __init__.py; cd ../;

To apply MOST to an example image, run the following example

python main_most.py --image_path <path_to_image> --visualize pred

Results are stored in the output directory given by parameter output_dir.

To run MOST on PASCAL VOC, COCO or other custom datasets, follow the dataset instructions of LOST. To launch MOST on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets, run

python main_most.py --dataset VOC07 --set trainval
python main_most.py --dataset VOC12 --set trainval

For COCO dataset, run

python main_most.py --dataset COCO20k --set train

To run with different patch sizes or architectures, run

python main_most.py --dataset VOC07 --set trainval #VIT-S/16
python main_most.py --dataset VOC07 --set trainval --patch_size 8 #VIT-S/8
python main_most.py --dataset VOC07 --set trainval --arch vit_base #VIT-B/16