Few-Shot Object Detection: Application to Medieval Musicological Studies

Detecting objects with a small representation in images is a challenging task, especially when the style of the images is very different from recent photos, which is the case for cultural heritage datasets. This problem is commonly known as few-shot object detection and is still a new field of research. This article presents a simple and effective method for black box few-shot object detection that works with all the current state-of-the-art object detection models. We also present a new dataset called MMSD for medieval musicological studies that contains five classes and 693 samples, manually annotated by a group of musicology experts. Due to the significant diversity of styles and considerable disparities between the artistic representations of the objects, our dataset is more challenging than the current standards. We evaluate our method on YOLOv4 (m/s), (Mask/Faster) RCNN, and ViT/Swin-t. We present two methods of benchmarking these models based on the overall data size and the worst-case scenario for object detection. The experimental results show that our method always improves object detector results compared to traditional transfer learning, regardless of the underlying architecture.