Out-of-Distribution Object Detection in Street Scenes via Synthetic Outlier Exposure and Transfer Learning

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Main Authors: Ilyas, Sadia, Mütze, Annika, Friedrichs, Klaus, Kurbiel, Thomas, Rottmann, Matthias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ilyas, Sadia
Mütze, Annika
Friedrichs, Klaus
Kurbiel, Thomas
Rottmann, Matthias
author_facet Ilyas, Sadia
Mütze, Annika
Friedrichs, Klaus
Kurbiel, Thomas
Rottmann, Matthias
contents Out-of-distribution (OOD) object detection is an important yet underexplored task. A reliable object detector should be able to handle OOD objects by localizing and correctly classifying them as OOD. However, a critical issue arises when such atypical objects are completely missed by the object detector and incorrectly treated as background. Existing OOD detection approaches in object detection often rely on complex architectures or auxiliary branches and typically do not provide a framework that treats in-distribution (ID) and OOD in a unified way. In this work, we address these limitations by enabling a single detector to detect OOD objects, that are otherwise silently overlooked, alongside ID objects. We present \textbf{SynOE-OD}, a \textbf{Syn}thetic \textbf{O}utlier-\textbf{E}xposure-based \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etection framework, that leverages strong generative models, like Stable Diffusion, and Open-Vocabulary Object Detectors (OVODs) to generate semantically meaningful, object-level data that serve as outliers during training. The generated data is used for transfer-learning to establish strong ID task performance and supplement detection models with OOD object detection robustness. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art average precision on an established OOD object detection benchmark, where OVODs, such as GroundingDINO, show limited zero-shot performance in detecting OOD objects in street-scenes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16122
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Out-of-Distribution Object Detection in Street Scenes via Synthetic Outlier Exposure and Transfer Learning
Ilyas, Sadia
Mütze, Annika
Friedrichs, Klaus
Kurbiel, Thomas
Rottmann, Matthias
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Out-of-distribution (OOD) object detection is an important yet underexplored task. A reliable object detector should be able to handle OOD objects by localizing and correctly classifying them as OOD. However, a critical issue arises when such atypical objects are completely missed by the object detector and incorrectly treated as background. Existing OOD detection approaches in object detection often rely on complex architectures or auxiliary branches and typically do not provide a framework that treats in-distribution (ID) and OOD in a unified way. In this work, we address these limitations by enabling a single detector to detect OOD objects, that are otherwise silently overlooked, alongside ID objects. We present \textbf{SynOE-OD}, a \textbf{Syn}thetic \textbf{O}utlier-\textbf{E}xposure-based \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etection framework, that leverages strong generative models, like Stable Diffusion, and Open-Vocabulary Object Detectors (OVODs) to generate semantically meaningful, object-level data that serve as outliers during training. The generated data is used for transfer-learning to establish strong ID task performance and supplement detection models with OOD object detection robustness. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art average precision on an established OOD object detection benchmark, where OVODs, such as GroundingDINO, show limited zero-shot performance in detecting OOD objects in street-scenes.
title Out-of-Distribution Object Detection in Street Scenes via Synthetic Outlier Exposure and Transfer Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16122