Weakly Supervised Attended Object Detection Using Gaze Data as Annotations
This work addresses the challenge of reducing annotation costs for object detection in cultural heritage applications, presenting an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting attended objects in cultural sites using egocentric vision by proposing a weakly supervised method that relies only on gaze data and frame-level labels, achieving satisfactory performance with significant time savings compared to a fully supervised Faster R-CNN detector.
We consider the problem of detecting and recognizing the objects observed by visitors (i.e., attended objects) in cultural sites from egocentric vision. A standard approach to the problem involves detecting all objects and selecting the one which best overlaps with the gaze of the visitor, measured through a gaze tracker. Since labeling large amounts of data to train a standard object detector is expensive in terms of costs and time, we propose a weakly supervised version of the task which leans only on gaze data and a frame-level label indicating the class of the attended object. To study the problem, we present a new dataset composed of egocentric videos and gaze coordinates of subjects visiting a museum. We hence compare three different baselines for weakly supervised attended object detection on the collected data. Results show that the considered approaches achieve satisfactory performance in a weakly supervised manner, which allows for significant time savings with respect to a fully supervised detector based on Faster R-CNN. To encourage research on the topic, we publicly release the code and the dataset at the following url: https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/WS_OBJ_DET/