Abstract

In this paper, we develop an open-set object detector, called Grounding DINO, by marrying Transformer-based detector DINO with grounded pre-training, which can detect arbitrary objects with human inputs such as category names or referring expressions. The key solution of open-set object detection is introducing language to a closed-set detector for open-set concept generalization. To effectively fuse language and vision modalities, we conceptually divide a closed-set detector into three phases and propose a tight fusion solution, which includes a feature enhancer, a language-guided query selection, and a cross-modality decoder for modalities fusion. We first pre-train Grounding DINO on large-scale datasets, including object detection data, grounding data, and caption data, and evaluate the model on both open-set object detection and referring object detection benchmarks. Grounding DINO performs remarkably well on all three settings, including benchmarks on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and RefCOCO/+/g. Grounding DINO achieves a $52.5$ AP on the COCO zero-shot11 1 In this paper, ‘zero-shot’ refers to scenarios where the training split of the test dataset is not utilized in the training process