Unsupervised pretraining has recently proven beneficial for computer vision tasks, including object detection. However, previous self-supervised approaches are not designed to handle a key aspect of detection: localizing objects. Here, we present DETReg, an unsupervised pretraining approach for object DEtection with TRansformers using Region priors. Motivated by the two tasks underlying object detection: localization and categorization, we combine two complementary signals for self-supervision. For an object localization signal, we use pseudo ground truth object bounding boxes from an off-the-shelf unsupervised region proposal method, Selective Search, which does not require training data and can detect objects at a high recall rate and very low precision. The categorization signal comes from an object embedding loss that encourages invariant object representations, from which the object category can be inferred. We show how to combine these two signals to train the Deformable DETR detection architecture from large amounts of unlabeled data. DETReg improves the performance over competitive baselines and previous self-supervised methods on standard benchmarks like MS COCO and PASCAL VOC. DETReg also outperforms previous supervised and unsupervised baseline approaches on low-data regime when trained with only 1%, 2%, 5%, and 10% of the labeled data on MS COCO. For code and pretrained models, visit the project page at https://amirbar.net/detreg
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