  Recent advances in object detection are mainly driven by deep learning with
large-scale detection benchmarks. However, the fully-annotated training set is
often limited for a target detection task, which may deteriorate the
performance of deep detectors. To address this challenge, we propose a novel
low-shot transfer detector (LSTD) in this paper, where we leverage rich
source-domain knowledge to construct an effective target-domain detector with
very few training examples. The main contributions are described as follows.
First, we design a flexible deep architecture of LSTD to alleviate transfer
difficulties in low-shot detection. This architecture can integrate the
advantages of both SSD and Faster RCNN in a unified deep framework. Second, we
introduce a novel regularized transfer learning framework for low-shot
detection, where the transfer knowledge (TK) and background depression (BD)
regularizations are proposed to leverage object knowledge respectively from
source and target domains, in order to further enhance fine-tuning with a few
target images. Finally, we examine our LSTD on a number of challenging low-shot
detection experiments, where LSTD outperforms other state-of-the-art
approaches. The results demonstrate that LSTD is a preferable deep detector for
low-shot scenarios.
