Salvage of Supervision in Weakly Supervised Object Detection

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has recently attracted much attention. However, the lack of bounding-box supervision makes its accuracy much lower than fully supervised object detection (FSOD), and currently modern FSOD techniques cannot be applied to WSOD. To bridge the performance and technical gaps between WSOD and FSOD, this paper proposes a new framework, Salvage of Supervision (SoS), with the key idea being to harness every potentially useful supervisory signal in WSOD: the weak image-level labels, the pseudo-labels, and the power of semi-supervised object detection. This paper proposes new approaches to utilize these weak and noisy signals effectively, and shows that each type of supervisory signal brings in notable improvements, outperforms existing WSOD methods (which mainly use only the weak labels) by large margins. The proposed SoS-WSOD method also has the ability to freely use modern FSOD techniques. SoSWSOD achieves 64.4 mAP(50) on VOC2007, 61.9 mAP(50) on VOC2012 and 16.6 mAP(50:95) on MS-COCO, and also has fast inference speed. Ablations and visualization further verify the effectiveness of SoS.