FSP-DETR: Few-Shot Prototypical Parasitic Ova Detection

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Authors: Shubham Trehan, Udhav Ramachandran, Akash Rao, Ruth C. Scimeca, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
Cited by: 0
References: 37

Abstract

Object detection in biomedical settings is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of labeled data and the frequent emergence of novel or rare categories. We present FSP-DETR, a unified detection framework that enables robust few-shot detection, open-set recognition, and generalization to unseen biomedical tasks within a single model. Built upon a class-agnostic DETR backbone, our approach constructs class prototypes from original support images and learns an embedding space using augmented views and a lightweight transformer decoder. Training jointly optimizes a prototype matching loss, an alignment-based separation loss, and a KL divergence regularization to improve discriminative feature learning and calibration under scarce supervision. Unlike prior work that tackles these tasks in isolation, FSP-DETR enables inference-time flexibility to support unseen class recognition, background rejection, and cross-task adaptation without retraining. We also introduce a new ova species detection benchmark with 20 parasite classes and establish standardized evaluation protocols. Extensive experiments across ova, blood cell, and malaria detection tasks demonstrate that FSP-DETR significantly outperforms prior few-shot and prototype-based detectors, especially in low-shot and open-set scenarios.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Digital Imaging for Blood Diseases Advanced Neural Network Applications AI in cancer detection

Publication details

Journal / source
2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
Publisher
IEEE
Pages
5342–5351
Publication date
6 March 2026
Language
EN