CROSS-SUPERVISED OBJECT DETECTION

Zitian Chen, Zhiqiang Shen, Jiahui Yu, Erik Learned-Miller

Keywords: Object detection, weakly supervised, transfer leaning

Abstract: After learning a new object category from image-level annotations (with no object bounding boxes), humans are remarkably good at precisely localizing those objects. However, building good object localizers (i.e., detectors) currently requires expensive instance-level annotations. While some work has been done on learning detectors from weakly labeled samples (with only class labels), these detectors do poorly at localization. In this work, we show how to build better object detectors from weakly labeled images of new categories by leveraging knowledge learned from fully labeled base categories. We call this learning paradigm cross-supervised object detection. While earlier works investigated this paradigm, they did not apply it to realistic complex images (e.g., COCO), and their performance was poor. We propose a unified framework that combines a detection head trained from instance-level annotations and a recognition head learned from image-level annotations, together with a spatial correlation module that bridges the gap between detection and recognition. These contributions enable us to better detect novel objects with image-level annotations in complex multi-object scenes such as the COCO dataset.

One-sentence Summary: We show how to build better object detectors from weakly labeled images of new categories by leveraging knowledge learned from fully labeled base categories.

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