Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Fast Region-Based CNN for Object Detection

Learning an effective object detector with little supervision is an essential but challenging problem in computer vision applications. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based object detector using weakly-supervised and semi-supervised information in the framework of fast region-based CNN (Fast R-CNN). The target is to obtain an object detector as accurate as the fully-supervised Fast R-CNN, but it requires less image annotation effort. To solve this problem, we use weakly-supervised training images (i.e., only the image-level annotation is given) and a few proportions of fully-supervised training images (i.e., the bounding box level annotation is given), that is a weakly- and semi-supervised (WASS) object detection setting. The proposed solution is termed as WASS R-CNN, in which there are two main components. At first, a weakly-supervised R-CNN is firstly trained; after that semi-supervised data are used for finetuning the weakly-supervised detector. We perform object detection experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset. The proposed WASS R-CNN achieves more than 85% of a fully-supervised Fast R-CNN's performance (measured using mean average precision) with only 10% of fully-supervised annotations together with weak supervision for all training images. The results show that the proposed learning framework can significantly reduce the labeling efforts for obtaining reliable object detectors.