This paper presents a cost-sensitive active Question-Answering (QA) framework for learning a nine-layer And-Or graph (AOG) from web images. The AOG explicitly represents object categories, poses viewpoints, parts, and detailed structures within the parts in a compositional hierarchy. The QA framework is designed to minimize an overall risk, which trades off the loss and query costs. The loss is defined for nodes in all layers of the AOG, including the generative loss (measuring the likelihood of the images) and the discriminative loss (measuring the fitness to human answers). The cost comprises both the human labor of answering questions and the computational cost of model learning. The cost-sensitive QA framework iteratively selects different storylines of questions to update different nodes in the AOG. Experiments showed that our method required much less human supervision (e.g., labeling parts on 3--10 training objects for each category) and achieved better performance than baseline methods.
Many weakly-supervised methods and unsupervised methods have been developed to learn object-level models. For example, studies of @cite_17 @cite_14 @cite_35 @cite_27 , object co-segmentation @cite_1 , and object discovery @cite_61 @cite_16 learned with image-level annotations (without object bounding boxes). In particular, @cite_28 @cite_51 did not require any annotations during the learning process. @cite_8 @cite_40 @cite_39 @cite_22 learned visual concepts from web images.
@cite_61 @cite_35 @cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_39 @cite_27 @cite_40 @cite_16 @cite_51 @cite_17
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Supervised object detection and semantic segmentation require object or even pixel level annotations. When there exist image level labels only, it is challenging for weakly supervised algorithms to achieve accurate predictions. The accuracy achieved by top weakly supervised algorithms is still significantly lower than their fully supervised counterparts. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised curriculum learning pipeline for multi-label object recognition, detection and semantic segmentation. In this pipeline, we first obtain intermediate object localization and pixel labeling results for the training images, and then use such results to train task-specific deep networks in a fully supervised manner. The entire process consists of four stages, including object localization in the training images, filtering and fusing object instances, pixel labeling for the training images, and task-specific network training. To obtain clean object instances in the training images, we propose a novel algorithm for filtering, fusing and classifying object instances collected from multiple solution mechanisms. In this algorithm, we incorporate both metric learning and density-based clustering to filter detected object instances. Experiments show that our weakly supervised pipeline achieves state-of-the-art results in multi-label image classification as well as weakly supervised object detection and very competitive results in weakly supervised semantic segmentation on MS-COCO, PASCAL VOC 2007 and PASCAL VOC 2012. A conventional approach to learning object detectors uses fully supervised learning techniques which assumes that a training image set with manual annotation of object bounding boxes are provided. The manual annotation of objects in large image sets is tedious and unreliable. Therefore, a weakly supervised learning approach is desirable, where the training set needs only binary labels regarding whether an image contains the target object class. In the weakly supervised approach a detector is used to iteratively annotate the training set and learn the object model. We present a novel weakly supervised learning framework for learning an object detector. Our framework incorporates a new initial annotation model to start the iterative learning of a detector and a model drift detection method that is able to detect and stop the iterative learning when the detector starts to drift away from the objects of interest. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the challenging PASCAL 2007 dataset. Weakly supervised object detection has attracted extensive research efforts in recent years. Without the need of annotating bounding boxes, the existing methods usually follow a two multi-stage pipeline with an online compulsive stage to extract object proposals, which is an order of magnitude slower than fast fully supervised object detectors such as SSD [31] and YOLO [34]. In this paper, we speedup online weakly supervised object detectors by orders of magnitude by proposing a novel generative adversarial learning paradigm. In the proposed paradigm, the generator is a one-stage object detector to generate bounding boxes from images. To guide the learning of object-level generator, a surrogator is introduced to mine high-quality bounding boxes for training. We further adapt a structural similarity loss in combination with an adversarial loss into the training objective, which solves the challenge that the bounding boxes produced by the surrogator may not well capture their ground truth. Our one-stage detector outperforms all existing schemes in terms of detection accuracy, running at 118 frames per second, which is up to 438A— faster than the state-of-the-art weakly supervised detectors [8, 30, 15, 27, 45]. The code will be available publicly soon. We present a weakly supervised model that jointly performs both semantic- and instance-segmentation – a particularly relevant problem given the substantial cost of obtaining pixel-perfect annotation for these tasks. In contrast to many popular instance segmentation approaches based on object detectors, our method does not predict any overlapping instances. Moreover, we are able to segment both “thing” and “stuff” classes, and thus explain all the pixels in the image. “Thing” classes are weakly-supervised with bounding boxes, and “stuff” with image-level tags. We obtain state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC, for both full and weak supervision (which achieves about 95 of fully-supervised performance). Furthermore, we present the first weakly-supervised results on Cityscapes for both semantic- and instance-segmentation. Finally, we use our weakly supervised framework to analyse the relationship between annotation quality and predictive performance, which is of interest to dataset creators. Weakly-supervised object localization methods tend to fail for object classes that consistently co-occur with the same background elements, e.g. trains on tracks. We propose a method to overcome these failures by adding a very small amount of model-specific additional annotation. The main idea is to cluster a deep network's mid-level representations and assign object or distractor labels to each cluster. Experiments show substantially improved localization results on the challenging ILSVC2014 dataset for bounding box detection and the PASCAL VOC2012 dataset for semantic segmentation. This paper addresses the well-established problem of unsupervised object discovery with a novel method inspired by weakly-supervised approaches. In particular, the ability of an object patch to predict the rest of the object (its context) is used as supervisory signal to help discover visually consistent object clusters. The main contributions of this work are: 1) framing unsupervised clustering as a leave-one-out context prediction task; 2) evaluating the quality of context prediction by statistical hypothesis testing between thing and stuff appearance models; and 3) an iterative region prediction and context alignment approach that gradually discovers a visual object cluster together with a segmentation mask and fine-grained correspondences. The proposed method outperforms previous unsupervised as well as weakly-supervised object discovery approaches, and is shown to provide correspondences detailed enough to transfer keypoint annotations. Weakly supervised discovery of common visual structure in highly variable, cluttered images is a key problem in recognition. We address this problem using deformable part-based models (DPM's) with latent SVM training [6]. These models have been introduced for fully supervised training of object detectors, but we demonstrate that they are also capable of more open-ended learning of latent structure for such tasks as scene recognition and weakly supervised object localization. For scene recognition, DPM's can capture recurring visual elements and salient objects; in combination with standard global image features, they obtain state-of-the-art results on the MIT 67-category indoor scene dataset. For weakly supervised object localization, optimization over latent DPM parameters can discover the spatial extent of objects in cluttered training images without ground-truth bounding boxes. The resulting method outperforms a recent state-of-the-art weakly supervised object localization approach on the PASCAL-07 dataset. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained image categorization system with easy deployment. We do not use any object part annotation (weakly supervised) in the training or in the testing stage, but only class labels for training images. Fine-grained image categorization aims to classify objects with only subtle distinctions (e.g., two breeds of dogs that look alike). Most existing works heavily rely on object part detectors to build the correspondence between object parts, which require accurate object or object part annotations at least for training images. The need for expensive object annotations prevents the wide usage of these methods. Instead, we propose to generate multi-scale part proposals from object proposals, select useful part proposals, and use them to compute a global image representation for categorization. This is specially designed for the weakly supervised fine-grained categorization task, because useful parts have been shown to play a critical role in existing annotation-dependent works, but accurate part detectors are hard to acquire. With the proposed image representation, we can further detect and visualize the key (most discriminative) parts in objects of different classes. In the experiments, the proposed weakly supervised method achieves comparable or better accuracy than the state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods and most existing annotation-dependent methods on three challenging datasets. Its success suggests that it is not always necessary to learn expensive object part detectors in fine-grained image categorization. Object detection when provided image-level labels instead of instance-level labels (i.e., bounding boxes) during training is an important problem in computer vision, since large scale image datasets with instance-level labels are extremely costly to obtain. In this paper, we address this challenging problem by developing an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based object detection method using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our method is applicable to both the weakly-supervised and semi-supervised settings. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 benchmark show that (1) in the weakly supervised setting, our method provides significant detection performance improvement over current state-of-the-art methods, (2) having access to a small number of strongly (instance-level) annotated images, our method can almost match the performace of the fully supervised Fast RCNN. We share our source code at this https URL Of late, weakly supervised object detection is with great importance in object recognition. Based on deep learning, weakly supervised detectors have achieved many promising results. However, compared with fully supervised detection, it is more challenging to train deep network based detectors in a weakly supervised manner. Here we formulate weakly supervised detection as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem, where instance classifiers (object detectors) are put into the network as hidden nodes. We propose a novel online instance classifier refinement algorithm to integrate MIL and the instance classifier refinement procedure into a single deep network, and train the network end-to-end with only image-level supervision, i.e., without object location information. More precisely, instance labels inferred from weak supervision are propagated to their spatially overlapped instances to refine instance classifier online. The iterative instance classifier refinement procedure is implemented using multiple streams in deep network, where each stream supervises its latter stream. Weakly supervised object detection experiments are carried out on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 benchmarks. We obtain 47 mAP on VOC 2007 that significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art. Despite the remarkable progress, weakly supervised segmentation approaches are still inferior to their fully supervised counterparts. We obverse the performance gap mainly comes from their limitation on learning to produce high-quality dense object localization maps from image-level supervision. To mitigate such a gap, we revisit the dilated convolution [1] and reveal how it can be utilized in a novel way to effectively overcome this critical limitation of weakly supervised segmentation approaches. Specifically, we find that varying dilation rates can effectively enlarge the receptive fields of convolutional kernels and more importantly transfer the surrounding discriminative information to non-discriminative object regions, promoting the emergence of these regions in the object localization maps. Then, we design a generic classification network equipped with convolutional blocks of different dilated rates. It can produce dense and reliable object localization maps and effectively benefit both weakly- and semi- supervised semantic segmentation. Despite the apparent simplicity, our proposed approach obtains superior performance over state-of-the-arts. In particular, it achieves 60.8 and 67.6 mIoU scores on Pascal VOC 2012 test set in weakly- (only image-level labels are available) and semi- (1,464 segmentation masks are available) supervised settings, which are the new state-of-the-arts. Learning a new object class from cluttered training images is very challenging when the location of object instances is unknown, i.e. in a weakly supervised setting. Many previous works require objects covering a large portion of the images. We present a novel approach that can cope with extensive clutter as well as large scale and appearance variations between object instances. To make this possible we exploit generic knowledge learned beforehand from images of other classes for which location annotation is available. Generic knowledge facilitates learning any new class from weakly supervised images, because it reduces the uncertainty in the location of its object instances. We propose a conditional random field that starts from generic knowledge and then progressively adapts to the new class. Our approach simultaneously localizes object instances while learning an appearance model specific for the class. We demonstrate this on several datasets, including the very challenging Pascal VOC 2007. Furthermore, our method allows training any state-of-the-art object detector in a weakly supervised fashion, although it would normally require object location annotations. Object category localization is a challenging problem in computer vision. Standard supervised training requires bounding box annotations of object instances. This time-consuming annotation process is sidestepped in weakly supervised learning. In this case, the supervised information is restricted to binary labels that indicate the absence presence of object instances in the image, without their locations. We follow a multiple-instance learning approach that iteratively trains the detector and infers the object locations in the positive training images. Our main contribution is a multi-fold multiple instance learning procedure, which prevents training from prematurely locking onto erroneous object locations. This procedure is particularly important when high-dimensional representations, such as the Fisher vectors, are used. We present a detailed experimental evaluation using the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset. Compared to state-of-the-art weakly supervised detectors, our approach better localizes objects in the training images, which translates into improved detection performance. Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: this https URL . We address the problem of localisation of objects as bounding boxes in images with weak labels. This weakly supervised object localisation problem has been tackled in the past using discriminative models where each object class is localised independently from other classes. We propose a novel framework based on Bayesian joint topic modelling. Our framework has three distinctive advantages over previous works: (1) All object classes and image backgrounds are modelled jointly together in a single generative model so that "explaining away" inference can resolve ambiguity and lead to better learning and localisation. (2) The Bayesian formulation of the model enables easy integration of prior knowledge about object appearance to compensate for limited supervision. (3) Our model can be learned with a mixture of weakly labelled and unlabelled data, allowing the large volume of unlabelled images on the Internet to be exploited for learning. Extensive experiments on the challenging VOC dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors. In recent years, the performance of object detection has advanced significantly with the evolution of deep convolutional neural networks. However, the state-of-the-art object detection methods still rely on accurate bounding box annotations that require extensive human labeling. Object detection without bounding box annotations, that is, weakly supervised detection methods, are still lagging far behind. As weakly supervised detection only uses image level labels and does not require the ground truth of bounding box location and label of each object in an image, it is generally very difficult to distill knowledge of the actual appearances of objects. Inspired by curriculum learning, this paper proposes an easy-to-hard knowledge transfer scheme that incorporates easy web images to provide prior knowledge of object appearance as a good starting point. While exploiting large-scale free web imagery, we introduce a sophisticated labor-free method to construct a web dataset with good diversity in object appearance. After that, semantic relevance and distribution relevance are introduced and utilized in the proposed curriculum training scheme. Our end-to-end learning with the constructed web data achieves remarkable improvement across most object classes, especially for the classes that are often considered hard in other works. We address the task of learning a semantic segmentation from weakly supervised data. Our aim is to devise a system that predicts an object label for each pixel by making use of only image level labels during training – the information whether a certain object is present or not in the image. Such coarse tagging of images is faster and easier to obtain as opposed to the tedious task of pixelwise labeling required in state of the art systems. We cast this task naturally as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. We use Semantic Texton Forest (STF) as the basic framework and extend it for the MIL setting. We make use of multitask learning (MTL) to regularize our solution. Here, an external task of geometric context estimation is used to improve on the task of semantic segmentation. We report experimental results on the MSRC21 and the very challenging VOC2007 datasets. On MSRC21 dataset we are able, by using 276 weakly labeled images, to achieve the performance of a supervised STF trained on pixelwise labeled training set of 56 images, which is a significant reduction in supervision needed. This paper addresses weakly supervised object detection with only image-level supervision at training stage. Previous approaches train detection models with entire images all at once, making the models prone to being trapped in sub-optimums due to the introduced false positive examples. Unlike them, we propose a zigzag learning strategy to simultaneously discover reliable object instances and prevent the model from overfitting initial seeds. Towards this goal, we first develop a criterion named mean Energy Accumulation Scores (mEAS) to automatically measure and rank localization difficulty of an image containing the target object, and accordingly learn the detector progressively by feeding examples with increasing difficulty. In this way, the model can be well prepared by training on easy examples for learning from more difficult ones and thus gain a stronger detection ability more efficiently. Furthermore, we introduce a novel masking regularization strategy over the high level convolutional feature maps to avoid overfitting initial samples. These two modules formulate a zigzag learning process, where progressive learning endeavors to discover reliable object instances, and masking regularization increases the difficulty of finding object instances properly. We achieve 47.6 mAP on PASCAL VOC 2007, surpassing the state-of-the-arts by a large margin. In a weakly-supervised scenario object detectors need to be trained using image-level annotation alone. Since bounding-box-level ground truth is not available, most of the solutions proposed so far are based on an iterative, Multiple Instance Learning framework in which the current classifier is used to select the highest-confidence boxes in each image, which are treated as pseudo-ground truth in the next training iteration. However, the errors of an immature classifier can make the process drift, usually introducing many of false positives in the training dataset. To alleviate this problem, we propose in this paper a training protocol based on the self-paced learning paradigm. The main idea is to iteratively select a subset of images and boxes that are the most reliable, and use them for training. While in the past few years similar strategies have been adopted for SVMs and other classifiers, we are the first showing that a self-paced approach can be used with deep-network-based classifiers in an end-to-end training pipeline. The method we propose is built on the fully-supervised Fast-RCNN architecture and can be applied to similar architectures which represent the input image as a bag of boxes. We show state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC 2007, Pascal VOC 2010 and ILSVRC 2013. On ILSVRC 2013 our results based on a low-capacity AlexNet network outperform even those weakly-supervised approaches which are based on much higher-capacity networks. Weakly-supervised object detection has attracted much attention lately, since it does not require bounding box annotations for training. Although significant progress has also been made, there is still a large gap in performance between weakly-supervised and fully-supervised object detection. Recently, some works use pseudo ground-truths which are generated by a weakly-supervised detector to train a supervised detector. Such approaches incline to find the most representative parts of objects, and only seek one ground-truth box per class even though many same-class instances exist. To overcome these issues, we propose a weakly-supervised to fully-supervised framework, where a weakly-supervised detector is implemented using multiple instance learning. Then, we propose a pseudo ground-truth excavation (PGE) algorithm to find the pseudo ground-truth of each instance in the image. Moreover, the pseudo ground-truth adaptation (PGA) algorithm is designed to further refine the pseudo ground-truths from PGE. Finally, we use these pseudo ground-truths to train a fully-supervised detector. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 benchmarks strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We obtain 52.4 and 47.8 mAP on VOC2007 and VOC2012 respectively, a significant improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods.