Leveraging Prior-Knowledge for Weakly Supervised Object Detection Under a Collaborative Self-Paced Curriculum Learning Framework

Dingwen Zhang, Junwei Han, Long Zhao, Deyu Meng

Abstract: Weakly supervised object detection is an interesting yet challenging research topic in computer vision community, which aims at learning object models to localize and detect the corresponding objects of interest only under the supervision of image-level annotation. For addressing this problem, this paper establishes a novel weakly supervised learning framework to leverage both the instance-level prior-knowledge and the image-level prior-knowledge based on a novel collaborative self-paced curriculum learning (C-SPCL) regime. Under the weak supervision, C-SPCL can leverage helpful prior-knowledge throughout the whole learning process and collaborate the instance-level confidence inference with the image-level confidence inference in a robust way. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior capacity of the proposed C-SPCL regime and the proposed whole framework as compared with state-of-the-art methods along this research line.