Low-Confidence Samples Mining for Semi-supervised Object Detection

Low-Confidence Samples Mining for Semi-supervised Object Detection

Guandu Liu, Fangyuan Zhang, Tianxiang Pan, Jun-Hai Yong, Bin Wang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1186-1194. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/132

Reliable pseudo labels from unlabeled data play a key role in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). However, the state-of-the-art SSOD methods all rely on pseudo labels with high confidence, which ignore valuable pseudo labels with lower confidence. Additionally, the insufficient excavation for unlabeled data results in an excessively low recall rate thus hurting the network training. In this paper, we propose a novel Low-confidence Samples Mining (LSM) method to utilize low confidence pseudo labels efficiently. Specifically, we develop an additional pseudo information mining (PIM) branch on account of low-resolution feature maps to extract reliable large area instances, the IoUs of which are higher than small area ones. Owing to the complementary predictions between PIM and the main branch, we further design self-distillation (SD) to compensate for both in a mutually learning manner. Meanwhile, the extensibility of the above approaches enables our LSM to apply to Faster-RCNN and Deformable-DETR respectively. On the MS-COCO benchmark, our method achieves 3.54% mAP improvement over state-of-the-art methods under 5% labeling ratios.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Recognition (object detection, categorization)
Data Mining: DM: Applications
Data Mining: DM: Exploratory data mining