ECAD: Expanding Class-Agnostic Detection Beyond Thing-Centric Objectness

Abstract

Object detection is a fundamental task in visual perception, providing structured region representations for recognition, grounding, reasoning, and interaction. However, existing detection paradigms largely inherit a thing-centric notion of objectness, where detectors are mainly trained to localize discrete and countable object instances. Consequently, many semantically meaningful visual elements, such as sky, road, grassland, water, and sports courts, are often absorbed into the background despite their importance for scene understanding and spatial reasoning. In this paper, we formulate Expanded Class-Agnostic Detection (ECAD), a new setting that aims to discover category-agnostic visual candidates beyond conventional thing-centric objects. To support this setting, we construct BTCO-Bench, a Beyond Thing-Centric Objectness benchmark with category-agnostic box annotations covering both real-world and cross-domain scenarios. We further propose ECADet, a lightweight DETR-based detector built upon a frozen DINOv3 encoder, and introduce Geometry-Aware Expert Regression (GAER) and Prototype-Guided Query Modulation (PGQM) to improve localization and objectness estimation for diverse visual elements, respectively. Extensive experiments show that ECADet consistently outperforms representative class-agnostic and proposal-based detectors on BTCO-Bench, demonstrating the effectiveness of expanded objectness discovery. Code and benchmark will be released.