Co-training for On-board Deep Object Detection
This addresses the bottleneck of human labeling for object detection in driver assistance and self-driving vehicles, but it is incremental as it applies an existing semi-supervised method to a specific scenario.
The paper tackles the problem of reducing human labeling effort for deep object detection, especially under domain shift between virtual and real-world images, by assessing co-training as a semi-supervised method, showing it works alone and with domain adaptation.
Providing ground truth supervision to train visual models has been a bottleneck over the years, exacerbated by domain shifts which degenerate the performance of such models. This was the case when visual tasks relied on handcrafted features and shallow machine learning and, despite its unprecedented performance gains, the problem remains open within the deep learning paradigm due to its data-hungry nature. Best performing deep vision-based object detectors are trained in a supervised manner by relying on human-labeled bounding boxes which localize class instances (i.e.objects) within the training images.Thus, object detection is one of such tasks for which human labeling is a major bottleneck. In this paper, we assess co-training as a semi-supervised learning method for self-labeling objects in unlabeled images, so reducing the human-labeling effort for developing deep object detectors. Our study pays special attention to a scenario involving domain shift; in particular, when we have automatically generated virtual-world images with object bounding boxes and we have real-world images which are unlabeled. Moreover, we are particularly interested in using co-training for deep object detection in the context of driver assistance systems and/or self-driving vehicles. Thus, using well-established datasets and protocols for object detection in these application contexts, we will show how co-training is a paradigm worth to pursue for alleviating object labeling, working both alone and together with task-agnostic domain adaptation.