  Detection Transformer (DETR) and Deformable DETR have been proposed to
eliminate the need for many hand-designed components in object detection while
demonstrating good performance as previous complex hand-crafted detectors.
However, their performance on Video Object Detection (VOD) has not been well
explored. In this paper, we present TransVOD, the first end-to-end video object
detection system based on spatial-temporal Transformer architectures. The first
goal of this paper is to streamline the pipeline of VOD, effectively removing
the need for many hand-crafted components for feature aggregation, e.g.,
optical flow model, relation networks. Besides, benefited from the object query
design in DETR, our method does not need complicated post-processing methods
such as Seq-NMS. In particular, we present a temporal Transformer to aggregate
both the spatial object queries and the feature memories of each frame. Our
temporal transformer consists of two components: Temporal Query Encoder (TQE)
to fuse object queries, and Temporal Deformable Transformer Decoder (TDTD) to
obtain current frame detection results. These designs boost the strong baseline
deformable DETR by a significant margin (3%-4% mAP) on the ImageNet VID
dataset. Then, we present two improved versions of TransVOD including
TransVOD++ and TransVOD Lite. The former fuses object-level information into
object query via dynamic convolution while the latter models the entire video
clips as the output to speed up the inference time. We give detailed analysis
of all three models in the experiment part. In particular, our proposed
TransVOD++ sets a new state-of-the-art record in terms of accuracy on ImageNet
VID with 90.0% mAP. Our proposed TransVOD Lite also achieves the best speed and
accuracy trade-off with 83.7% mAP while running at around 30 FPS on a single
V100 GPU device.
