# Web-Scale Generic Object Detection at Microsoft Bing

Source: [Web-Scale Generic Object Detection at Microsoft Bing](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6a591e209131cea27a25>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:08:37.319Z

Authors: Stephen Xi Chen, Saurajit Mukherjee, Unmesh Phadke, Tingting Wang, Junwon Park, Ravi Theja Yada

Published: 2021-07-05T06:46:09.000Z

## Abstract

In this paper, we present Generic Object Detection (GenOD), one of the largest object detection systems deployed to a web-scale general visual search engine that can detect over 900 categories for all Microsoft Bing Visual Search queries in near real-time. It acts as a fundamental visual query understanding service that provides object-centric information and shows gains in multiple production scenarios, improving upon domain-specific models. We discuss the challenges of collecting data, training, deploying and updating such a large-scale object detection model with multiple dependencies. We discuss a data collection pipeline that reduces per-bounding box labeling cost by 81.5% and latency by 61.2% while improving on annotation quality. We show that GenOD can improve weighted average precision by over 20% compared to multiple domain-specific models. We also improve the model update agility by nearly 2 times with the proposed disjoint detector training compared to joint fine-tuning. Finally we demonstrate how GenOD benefits visual search applications by significantly improving object-level search relevance by 54.9% and user engagement by 59.9%.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.01814>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.01814.pdf>)
