

The feature vectors are passed to the encoder, which learns the image representations using its attention layers. Next, the encoder hidden states are combined with object queries in the decoder. Object queries are learned embeddings that focus on the different regions of an image, and they're updated as they progress through each attention layer. The decoder hidden states are passed to a feedforward network that predicts the bounding box coordinates and class label for each object query, or no object if there isn't one.
DETR decodes each object query in parallel to output N final predictions, where N is the number of queries. Unlike a typical autoregressive model that predicts one element at a time, object detection is a set prediction task (bounding box, class label) that makes N predictions in a single pass.