Detectron Q&A: The origins, evolution, and future of our pioneering computer vision library

The research team behind Meta AI's Detectron project has recently been awarded the PAMI Mark Everingham Prize for contributions to the computer vision community. We first open-sourced the Detectron codebase five years ago as a collection of state-of-the-art algorithms for tasks such as object detection and segmentation. It has since evolved and advanced in important ways thanks to the contributions of both the open source community and many researchers here at Meta. In 2019, we released a ground-up rewrite of the codebase entirely in PyTorch to make it faster, more modular, more flexible, and easier to use in both research-first and production-oriented projects. Earlier this year, we released Detectron2Go, a state-of-the-art extension for training and deploying efficient object detection models on mobile devices and hardware, as well as significantly improved baselines based on the recently published state-of-the-art results produced by other experts in the field. Several members of the Detectron team sat down to discuss the project's origins, advances, and future.