Our class incremental learning setup is as follows, given an object detector that has been trained on C classes, when a new class C_n comes and we are given a dataset D_n which comprises a set of pairs (X_n, Y_n), where X_n is an image of size H × W and Y_n is the ground-truth. Here, Y_n only consists of labels in current classes C_n. The model should be able to predict all classes C₁: C_n in the history.

The detail of the proposed CSD is shown in Fig. 2. When learning a new class. We train the new model using the new class samples and labels, consider the output of new samples in the old model, and ensure that the new model avoids catastrophic forgetting. In order to avoid the instability caused by large models, we use the CSD at the block level. The proposed CSD can make better use of similar information. After each block, we use the weighted distillation loss to decide the degree of distillation according to the similarity between the new class and the old classes, i.e., if the old classes are more similar to the new classes, then the weights are small in the distillation process of the new class, and vice versa.

We first obtain the prototype of new class k by computing an in-batch average shown in Fig. 2 on Z = R^H×W×C. Given a batch of feature maps B = R^B×H×W×C, we flatten the batch, height and width dimensions and index the as z_i, where i = 1, …, BHW. The centroid of class c is computed as Eq. (1) (1) p k = ∑ i = 1 B H W z i 1 y i = k k where 1[y_i = k] = 1 if the label y_i is k, otherwise 1[y_i = k] = 0. The cummulative prototypes P₁:P_k of all classes from class 1 to class t are computed at the end of class k.

We construct a prototype map m_x = R^HxW×C where each pixel x contains a prototype vector m_x = p_k Then we compute a similarity map S = R^HxWxV between the prototype m_x of a new class in each pixel x and the prototype is p_k of old class. Each entry S_(x,k) is cosine similarity between m and p_k, the normalized similarity map S is defined as (2) S = exp m x ⋅ p k t − 1 m x ⋅ p k t − 1 ∑ j = 1 k exp m x ⋅ p j t − 1 m x ⋅ p j t − 1 .

Finally the class similarity distillation loss distills the weighted outputs of the old model and the new model: (3) L s k , x = ∑ k = 1 m S x − k 2 where k and x are old class and new class features.

Learning this similarity provides two benefits. As a first step, the model can relate the new class to what it had previously learned, which facilitates the transfer of the old knowledge to the new class for a better learning experience. Second, it encourages the model to learn the underlying class hierarchy implicitly. We do not need to save the class ID and only save the prototype when the new class are well trained so that we can learn the similarity of the new class more quickly.

In order to maximize the extraction of correlation features of different class objects in remote sensing images, we propose the global similarity loss (GBL) to maximize the similarity information of old class and new new by maximizing the mutual information in the instance level before classification and regression results. The GBL is shown in Eq. (4) (4) L g = S x t , y t ∑ j = 1 k S x j , y t where x_t is the old instance-level class feature, and y_t is current instance-level class feature, x_j is noisy old class feature. and S() is cosine similarity. Maximizing this equation is equivalent to maximizing the relationship between the model discriminated learned and unlearned classes, and maximizing the mutual information of the new class and the old classes.

In general, the way Ren et al. (2015) assigns positive and negative labels for training samples in remote sensing datasets is based on the size of anchors. Some datasets contain multiple class samples simultaneously. Thus, some unknown class positive samples are labeled as new class negative samples, leading to decreased efficiency and accuracy in learning these samples.

To solve this problem, we propose an RPN-based technique for assigning positive and negative samples to label potential new classes. Specifically, these new classes will be designated as unknown samples, which means they will not be included in the training of positive and negative samples, thereby avoiding the problem of new tasks appearing in old tasks, which would result in inadequate training.

Firstly, based on the characteristics of the region proposal network (RPN), which can output the class probability scores and the bounding boxes of almost all objects, our approach is to treat those objects with higher objective scores but do not have higher IoU with ground-truth scores as potential unknown objects that should not be included in the training of the positive and negative samples. Specifically, a negative sample is defined as “1” where the probability score ranking of the last k objects is less than a certain threshold, and at the same time, the IoU of the ground-truth is less than a certain threshold.

The loss function of the entire framework is shown as Eq. (5). (5) L = L d e t + a L s + b L g .

The first of them is the faster R-CNN detection loss function, the second term is the proposed class similarity distillation loss, and the third is the global similarity loss. We use gradient descent with momentum to optimize the model. During the training period, we first fix the other parameters and train the RPN of new class branches of the parameters to converge, and then we train all the parameters. The results prove the effectiveness of the training method.

To obtain a generic model performance estimate, after training task t, we compute the average accuracy (AA) on all testing datasets of tasks T. The average accuracy is defined as Eq. (6). The higher the average accuracy, the better the performance of the model. (6) A A = 1 T ∑ t = 1 T TP t + TN t P t + N t × 100 where TP and TN are the numbers of correctly classified samples. P_t and N_t are the number of positive and negative samples for task t. T is the total number of tasks.

We used ResNet as the uniform backbone, and it can be seen from the AA on both datasets in Table 1 that the proposed method improves by 5% compared with the SOTA method FPN-IL (Chen et al., 2020). This is because our method can consider the old class features when learning new classes, thus obtaining a higher AA. Other methods use traditional methods to generate class agnostic RoI or use the dispersion of features before RPN to learn new knowledge and do not fully use the new class information of similarity, so the detection results are unsatisfactory.

Table 1 shows the detection results on each class in the new seven classes of the DOTA dataset. The detection result by Fast-IL (Shmelkov, Schmid & Alahari, 2017) is poor in detecting every class, as the detection framework is not effective. The Faster-IL (Hao et al., 2019b) and FPN-IL (Chen et al., 2020) are much better than Fast-IL, but the average accuracy (AA) is lower as the number of classes increases. Meta-ILOD (Joseph et al., 2021b) uses meta-learning to learn a global optimum solution without learning the similarity between classes. SID (Peng et al., 2021) employs distillation in some intermediate features, while our method performs global information distillation at various scales, resulting in better performance compared to SID. The training process of ORE (Joseph et al., 2021a) is more complicated, requiring a long pre-training period to achieve good results. Compared with the CWSD (Feng et al., 2021), the proposed method is supplemented by weighted similarity not only supplements similar features. The proposed method has improved approximately 1% on AA compared to the four most recent methods, and as the classes increase, the detection of the new class does not show a noticeable drop.

To demonstrate in more detail that the proposed method can learn the similarity information among classes well, we list the average accuracy of each class for each class, as shown in Table 2. In the DOTA dataset, because the class of baseball field (BF) was learned before when learning new categories such as tennis court (TC) and basketball court (BC), which have relatively similar characteristics to a baseball court (BC), the accuracy of our method in detecting these is significantly higher than that of other methods. Since our approach uses the same backbone architecture as FPN-IL, it has similar performance during joint training without having learned from similar samples. However, due to our method’s ability to fully learn similar information, it performs better when learning from similar samples later on, such as SBF, SP, HC, etc. Meta-ILOD (Joseph et al., 2021b) employs meta-learning to obtain a global optimum solution without learning inter-class similarities, while our approach conducts global information distillation at multiple scales, leading to enhanced performance in comparison. The training process of ORE (Joseph et al., 2021a) is complex, and the CWSD (Feng et al., 2021) is not in line with the continual learning setting. Therefore, the proposed method achieves roughly a 1% average improvement in AA compared to the four most recent techniques mentioned above. Although the accuracy of each class varies slightly with the learning order, the overall AA and joint training are comparable due to the learning of the old class similarity by the proposed method, and there is a significant improvement in AA when the similarity task is learned later. This shows that the proposed method is stable and effective.

Figure 3 shows the visualization detection results of the proposed method on the DOTA dataset with the truck as the old task to learn the new task sedan, and the visualization detection results with the soccer ball field (SBF) as the old task to learn the basketball court (BC) and tennis court (TC). From the detection results, we can see that our method obtains high average accuracy on both new and old classes. In contrast, other methods have many missed detections on the old class, as shown in the red box, which is because our method can learn information about the similarity between classes, preventing catastrophic forgetting while accelerating the learning of new classes.

Figure 4 shows the comparison of the visualization results in the DIOR dataset with low similarity of learning tasks, and since the proposed method can adjust the distillation weights adaptively according to the task similarity, it can also obtain better detection results.

Furthermore, the heatmaps are used to verify the effectiveness of the similarity distillation method we proposed in Fig. 5. In the heatmaps, the darker the color of the heat map, the more critical the area is. Figure 1 shows that we first learn the class SBF and then learn the class BC. From the change in the heat map of the network, the SBF in the bottom right corner of the heatmap (a) is activated. When the network continues to learn the class BC, both areas can be activated, which shows that the proposed incremental learning method can remember the previous knowledge well. Moreover, after learning BC, the activation area of SBF changes from the annular to the central square area, which shows that the network can learn the similarity features between classes.

Based on the public natural scene image dataset VOC, we tested the class similarity distillation method to verify the effectiveness of class incremental object detection, as shown in Table 3. For CSD in the last row, we used the settings described in the implementation details. To compare, we also replaced the CSD loss with the L2 loss to minimize the distance between the selected features. As a result of the performance of CSD on average accuracy, it is consistently superior to other methods, proving that it is more appropriate to obtain a trade-off between stability and plasticity for continuous object detection by using CSD. For 19+1 and 15+5 tasks, CSD is more effective than the L2 loss on average accuracy. Since CSD enforces the instance-level features of the incremental model to imitate the features of the old incremental model to a high degree, the performance of the old classes can be adequately maintained.

In contrast, the performance of the new classes will be suppressed at the same time. A comparison of CSD and L2 loss on average accuracy shows that CSD is more effective than L2 loss for 19+1 and 15+5 tasks. CSD enforces instance-level features of the incremental model to entirely mimic those of the old model so that the performance of old classes can be maintained simultaneously as the performance of new classes is suppressed simultaneously.

An ablation study is performed to validate the contribution of distillation loss in the DOTA dataset. Like the experiment in Table 2, we incrementally learn the following seven classes. The results of the ablation experiments in Table 4 show the effectiveness of the proposed CSD and GSD. In Table 4, the second column is the result obtained without the distillation algorithm, the second and third columns are the AA obtained by using one distillation loss, respectively, and the last column is the result of using two distillation losses at the same time. Each distillation loss we proposed can boost AA, and the best results can be obtained when used together.