This work provides a simple approach to discover tight object bounding boxes with only image-level supervision, called Tight box mining with Surrounding Segmentation Context (TS2C). We observe that object candidates mined through current multiple instance learning methods are usually trapped to discriminative object parts, rather than the entire object. TS2C leverages surrounding segmentation context derived from weakly-supervised segmentation to suppress such low-quality distracting candidates and boost the high-quality ones. Specifically, TS2C is developed based on two key properties of desirable bounding boxes: 1) high purity, meaning most pixels in the box are with high object response, and 2) high completeness, meaning the box covers high object response pixels comprehensively. With such novel and computable criteria, more tight candidates can be discovered for learning a better object detector. With TS2C, we obtain 48.0 and 44.4 mAP scores on VOC 2007 and 2012 benchmarks, which are the new state-of-the-arts.
Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) provides a suitable way for formulating and solving WSOD. In specific, if an image is annotated with a specific class, at least one proposal instance from the image is positive for this class; and no proposal instance is positive for unlabeled classes. Previous works on applying MIL to WSOD can be roughly categorized into two-step @cite_17 @cite_13 @cite_42 @cite_41 and end-to-end @cite_33 @cite_38 @cite_40 @cite_29 @cite_25 @cite_28 based approaches.
@cite_38 @cite_33 @cite_41 @cite_28 @cite_29 @cite_42 @cite_40 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_17
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Multiple instance learning (MIL) can reduce the need for costly annotation in tasks such as semantic segmentation by weakening the required degree of supervision. We propose a novel MIL formulation of multi-class semantic segmentation learning by a fully convolutional network. In this setting, we seek to learn a semantic segmentation model from just weak image-level labels. The model is trained end-to-end to jointly optimize the representation while disambiguating the pixel-image label assignment. Fully convolutional training accepts inputs of any size, does not need object proposal pre-processing, and offers a pixelwise loss map for selecting latent instances. Our multi-class MIL loss exploits the further supervision given by images with multiple labels. We evaluate this approach through preliminary experiments on the PASCAL VOC segmentation challenge. Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD), using only image-level annotations to train object detectors, is of growing importance in object recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel deep network for WSOD. Unlike previous networks that transfer the object detection problem to an image classification problem using Multiple Instance Learning (MIL), our strategy generates proposal clusters to learn refined instance classifiers by an iterative process. The proposals in the same cluster are spatially adjacent and associated with the same object. This prevents the network from concentrating too much on parts of objects instead of whole objects. We first show that instances can be assigned object or background labels directly based on proposal clusters for instance classifier refinement, and then show that treating each cluster as a small new bag yields fewer ambiguities than the directly assigning label method. The iterative instance classifier refinement is implemented online using multiple streams in convolutional neural networks, where the first is an MIL network and the others are for instance classifier refinement supervised by the preceding one. Experiments are conducted on the PASCAL VOC, ImageNet detection, and MS-COCO benchmarks for WSOD. Results show that our method outperforms the previous state of the art significantly. We present a framework for active learning in the multiple-instance (MI) setting. In an MI learning problem, instances are naturally organized into bags and it is the bags, instead of individual instances, that are labeled for training. MI learners assume that every instance in a bag labeled negative is actually negative, whereas at least one instance in a bag labeled positive is actually positive. We consider the particular case in which an MI learner is allowed to selectively query unlabeled instances from positive bags. This approach is well motivated in domains in which it is inexpensive to acquire bag labels and possible, but expensive, to acquire instance labels. We describe a method for learning from labels at mixed levels of granularity, and introduce two active query selection strategies motivated by the MI setting. Our experiments show that learning from instance labels can significantly improve performance of a basic MI learning algorithm in two multiple-instance domains: content-based image retrieval and text classification. Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a paradigm in supervised learning that deals with the classification of collections of instances called bags. Each bag contains a number of instances from which features are extracted. The complexity of MIL is largely dependent on the number of instances in the training data set. Since we are usually confronted with a large instance space even for moderately sized real-world data sets applications, it is important to design efficient instance selection techniques to speed up the training process without compromising the performance. In this paper, we address the issue of instance selection in MIL. We propose MILIS, a novel MIL algorithm based on adaptive instance selection. We do this in an alternating optimization framework by intertwining the steps of instance selection and classifier learning in an iterative manner which is guaranteed to converge. Initial instance selection is achieved by a simple yet effective kernel density estimator on the negative instances. Experimental results demonstrate the utility and efficiency of the proposed approach as compared to the state of the art. Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) provides a framework for training a discriminative classifier from data with ambiguous labels. This framework is well suited for the task of learning object classifiers from weakly labeled image data, where only the presence of an object in an image is known, but not its location. Some recent work has explored the application of MIL algorithms to the tasks of image categorization and natural scene classification. In this paper we extend these ideas in a framework that uses MIL to recognize and localizeobjects in images. To achieve this we employ state of the art image descriptors and multiple stable segmentations. These components, combined with a powerful MIL algorithm, form our object recognition system called MILSS. We show highly competitive object categorization results on the Caltech dataset. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm further, we introduce the challenging Landmarks-18 dataset, a collection of photographs of famous landmarks from around the world. The results on this new dataset show the great potential of our proposed algorithm. We propose a new theoretical framework for analyzing the multiple-instance learning (MIL) setting. In MIL, training examples are provided to a learning algorithm in the form of labeled sets, or "bags," of instances. Applications of MIL include 3-D quantitative structure-activity relationship prediction for drug discovery and content-based image retrieval for web search. The goal of an algorithm is to learn a function that correctly labels new bags or a function that correctly labels new instances. We propose that bags should be treated as latent distributions from which samples are observed. We show that it is possible to learn accurate instance - and bag-labeling functions in this setting as well as functions that correctly rank bags or instances under weak assumptions. Additionally, our theoretical results suggest that it is possible to learn to rank efficiently using traditional, well-studied "supervised" learning approaches. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation that supports the theoretical predictions entailed by the new framework. The proposed theoretical framework leads to a better understanding of the relationship between the MI and standard supervised learning settings, and it provides new methods for learning from MI data that are more accurate, more efficient, and have better understood theoretical properties than existing MI-specific algorithms. We present a new approach to multiple instance learning (MIL) that is particularly effective when the positive bags are sparse (i.e. contain few positive instances). Unlike other SVM-based MIL methods, our approach more directly enforces the desired constraint that at least one of the instances in a positive bag is positive. Using both artificial and real-world data, we experimentally demonstrate that our approach achieves greater accuracy than state-of-the-art MIL methods when positive bags are sparse, and performs competitively when they are not. In particular, our approach is the best performing method for image region classification. Relevant and irrelevant images collected from the Web (e.g., Flickr.com) have been employed as loosely labeled training data for image categorization and retrieval. In this work, we propose a new approach to learn a robust classifier for text-based image retrieval (TBIR) using relevant and irrelevant training web images, in which we explicitly handle noise in the loose labels of training images. Specifically, we first partition the relevant and irrelevant training web images into clusters. By treating each cluster as a “bag” and the images in each bag as “instances”, we formulate this task as a multi-instance learning problem with constrained positive bags, in which each positive bag contains at least a portion of positive instances. We present a new algorithm called MIL-CPB to effectively exploit such constraints on positive bags and predict the labels of test instances (images). Observing that the constraints on positive bags may not always be satisfied in our application, we additionally propose a progressive scheme (referred to as Progressive MIL-CPB, or PMIL-CPB) to further improve the retrieval performance, in which we iteratively partition the top-ranked training web images from the current MIL-CPB classifier to construct more confident positive “bags” and then add these new “bags” as training data to learn the subsequent MIL-CPB classifiers. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging real-world web image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We introduce a boosting framework for multiple instance learning (MIL) with varied aggregation of instances. In this framework, a diverse set of aggregation functions can be used to refine the notion of a positive bag for multiple instance learning. We investigate the effect of a wide range of orness in aggregation, using ordered weighted averaging. Thus, we obtain a new notion of a positive bag, which can represent different levels of ambiguity. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm on popular MIL datasets. The experimental results show that this algorithm outperforms the standard MILBoost algorithm. We introduce a graphical framework for multiple instance learning (MIL) based on Markov networks. This framework can be used to model the traditional MIL definition as well as more general MIL definitions. Different levels of ambiguity -- the portion of positive instances in a bag -- can be explored in weakly supervised data. To train these models, we propose a discriminative max-margin learning algorithm leveraging efficient inference for cardinality-based cliques. The efficacy of the proposed framework is evaluated on a variety of data sets. Experimental results verify that encoding or learning the degree of ambiguity can improve classification performance.