Given an image, we would like to learn to detect objects belonging to particular object categories. Common object detection methods train on large annotated datasets which are annotated in terms of bounding boxes that contain the object of interest. Previous works on object detection model the problem as a structured regression problem which ranks the correct bounding boxes more than the background ones. In this paper we develop algorithms which actively obtain annotations from human annotators for a small set of images, instead of all images, thereby reducing the annotation effort. Towards this goal, we make the following contributions: 1. We develop a principled version space based active learning method that solves for object detection as a structured prediction problem in a weakly supervised setting 2. We derive the relation between our proposed method with other active learning techniques such as maximum model change 3. Additionally, we propose two variants of the margin-based querying strategy 4. We analyse the results on standard object detection benchmarks that show that with only 20 of the data we can obtain more than 95 of the localization accuracy of full supervision. Our methods outperform random sampling and the classical uncertainty-based active learning algorithms like entropy
Support vector machines have met with significant success in numerous real-world learning tasks. However, like most machine learning algorithms, they are generally applied using a randomly selected training set classified in advance. In many settings, we also have the option of using pool-based active learning. Instead of using a randomly selected training set, the learner has access to a pool of unlabeled instances and can request the labels for some number of them. We introduce a new algorithm for performing active learning with support vector machines, i.e., an algorithm for choosing which instances to request next. We provide a theoretical motivation for the algorithm using the notion of a version space. We present experimental results showing that employing our active learning method can significantly reduce the need for labeled training instances in both the standard inductive and transductive settings.