Online Active Proposal Set Generation for weakly supervised object detection

To reduce the manpower consumption on box-level annotations, many weakly supervised object detection methods which only require image-level annotations, have been proposed recently. The training process in these methods is formulated into two steps. They firstly train a neural network under weak supervision to generate pseudo ground truths (PGTs). Then, these PGTs are used to train another network under full supervision. Compared with fully supervised methods, the training process in weakly supervised methods becomes more complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, overwhelming negative proposals are involved at the first step. This is neglected by most methods, which makes the training network biased towards to negative proposals and thus degrades the quality of the PGTs, limiting the training network performance at the second step. Online proposal sampling is an intuitive solution to these issues. However, lacking of adequate labeling, a simple online proposal sampling may make the training network stuck into local minima. To solve this problem, we propose an Online Active Proposal Set Generation (OPG) algorithm. Our OPG algorithm consists of two parts: Dynamic Proposal Constraint (DPC) and Proposal Partition (PP). DPC is proposed to dynamically determine different proposal sampling strategies according to the current training state. PP is used to score each proposal, part proposals into different sets and generate an active proposal set for the network optimization. Through experiments, our proposed OPG shows consistent and significant improvement on both datasets PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012, yielding comparable performance to the state-of-the-art results. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.