Example-Based Object Detection

In recent years, object detection has achieved significant progress, especially in the field of open-vocabulary object detection. Unlike traditional methods that rely on predefined categories, open-vocabulary approaches can detect arbitrary objects based on human-provided prompts. With the advancement of prompt-based detection techniques, models such as SAM3 can even outperform some category-specific detectors trained on particular datasets without requiring additional training on those datasets. However, despite these advancements, false positives and false negatives still occur. In practical engineering applications, persistent misdetections or missed detections of the same object are unacceptable. Yet retraining the model every time such errors occur incurs substantial costs in terms of human effort, computational resources, and time. Therefore, how to leverage existing false positive and false negative samples to prevent such errors from recurring remains a highly challenging and urgent problem. To address this issue, we propose EBOD (Example-Based Object Detection), which integrates a prompt-based detector (SAM3) with robust feature matching modules (DINOv3 and LightGlue). The proposed framework effectively suppresses the repeated occurrence of false positives and false negatives by leveraging previous error examples, without requiring additional model retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/sunzx97/examples_based_object_detection.

ZhiXin Sun · 2026