Proposal Learning for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

In this paper, we focus on semi-supervised object detection to boost accuracies of proposal-based object detectors (a.k.a. two-stage object detectors) by training on both labeled and unlabeled data. However, it is non-trivial to train object detectors on unlabeled data due to the unavailability of ground truth labels. To address this problem, we present a proposal learning approach to learn proposal features and predictions from both labeled and unlabeled data. The approach consists of a self-supervised proposal learning module and a consistency-based proposal learning module. In the self-supervised proposal learning module, we present a proposal location loss and a contrastive loss to learn context-aware and noise-robust proposal features respectively. In the consistency-based proposal learning module, we apply consistency losses to both bounding box classification and regression predictions of proposals to learn noise-robust proposal features and predictions. Experiments are conducted on the COCO dataset with all available labeled and unlabeled data. Results show that our approach consistently improves the accuracies of fully-supervised baselines. In particular, after combining with data distillation, our approach improves AP by about 2.0% and 0.9% on average compared with fully-supervised baselines and data distillation baselines respectively.