Training deep object detectors requires significant amount of human-annotated images with accurate object labels and bounding box coordinates, which are extremely expensive to acquire. Noisy annotations are much more easily accessible, but they could be detrimental for learning. We address the challenging problem of training object detectors with noisy annotations, where the noise contains a mixture of label noise and bounding box noise. We propose a learning framework which jointly optimizes object labels, bounding box coordinates, and model parameters by performing alternating noise correction and model training. To disentangle label noise and bounding box noise, we propose a two-step noise correction method. The first step performs class-agnostic bounding box correction by minimizing classifier discrepancy and maximizing region objectness. The second step distils knowledge from dual detection heads for soft label correction and class-specific bounding box refinement. We conduct experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO dataset with both synthetic noise and machine-generated noise. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance by effectively cleaning both label noise and bounding box noise. Code to reproduce all results will be released.
Supervised training of object detectors requires well-annotated large-scale datasets, whose production is costly. Therefore, some efforts have been made to obtain annotations in economical ways, such as cloud sourcing. However, datasets obtained by these methods tend to contain noisy annotations such as inaccurate bounding boxes and incorrect class labels. In this study, we propose a new problem setting of training object detectors on datasets with entangled noises of annotations of class labels and bounding boxes. Our proposed method efficiently decouples the entangled noises, corrects the no…
Deep convolutional neural networks have driven substantial advancements in the automatic understanding of images. Requiring a large collection of images and their associated annotations is one of the main bottlenecks limiting the adoption of deep networks. In the task of medical image segmentation, requiring pixel-level semantic annotations performed by human experts exacerbate this difficulty. This paper proposes a new framework to train a fully convolutional segmentation network from a large set of cheap unreliable annotations and a small set of expert-level clean annotations. We propose a s…
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Semi-supervised learning aims to leverage a large amount of unlabeled data for performance boosting. Existing works primarily focus on image classification. In this paper, we delve into semi-supervised learning for object detection, where labeled data are more labor-intensive to collect. Current methods are easily distracted by noisy regions generated by pseudo labels. To combat the noisy labeling, we propose noise-resistant semi-supervised learning by quantifying the region uncertainty. We first investigate the adverse effects brought by different forms of noise associated with pseudo labels.…
Recently, the availability of remote sensing imagery from aerial vehicles and satellites constantly improved. For an automated interpretation of such data, deep-learning-based object detectors achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, established object detectors require complete, precise, and correct bounding box annotations for training. In order to create the necessary training annotations for object detectors, imagery can be georeferenced and combined with data from other sources, such as points of interest localized by GPS sensors. Unfortunately, this combination often leads to poor …
How to Efficiently Annotate Images for Best-Performing Deep Learning Based Segmentation Models: An Empirical Study with Weak and Noisy Annotations and Segment Anything Model
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Baidu USA LLC（百度美国有限责任公司）
Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) models a joint distribution of images and labels from an annotated source domain and learns a domain-invariant transformation to estimate the target labels with the given target domain images. Existing methods assume that the source domain labels are completely clean, yet large-scale datasets often contain error-prone annotations due to instance ambiguity, which may lead to a biased source distribution and severely degrade the performance of the domain adaptive detector de facto. In this paper, we represent the first effort to formulate noisy DAOD and pr…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Deep learning methods require massive of annotated data for optimizing parameters. For example, datasets attached with accurate bounding box annotations are essential for modern object detection tasks. However, labeling with such pixel-wise accuracy is laborious and time-consuming, and elaborate labeling procedures are indispensable for reducing man-made noise, involving annotation review and acceptance testing. In this paper, we focus on the impact of noisy location annotations on the performance of object detection approaches and aim to, on the user side, reduce the adverse effect of the noi…
NYU Center for Data Science（纽约大学数据科学中心）；NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences（纽约大学库朗数学科学研究所）
Deep learning in the presence of noisy annotations has been studied extensively in classification, but much less in segmentation tasks. In this work, we study the learning dynamics of deep segmentation networks trained on inaccurately-annotated data. We discover a phenomenon that has been previously reported in the context of classification: the networks tend to first fit the clean pixel-level labels during an "early-learning" phase, before eventually memorizing the false annotations. However, in contrast to classification, memorization in segmentation does not arise simultaneously for all sem…
One of the problems on the way to successful implementation of neural networks is the quality of annotation. For instance, different annotators can annotate images in a different way and very often their decisions do not match exactly and in extreme cases are even mutually exclusive which results in noisy annotations and, consequently, inaccurate predictions. To avoid that problem in the task of computed tomography (CT) imaging segmentation we propose a clearing algorithm for annotations. It consists of 3 stages: - annotators scoring, which assigns a higher confidence level to better annotator…
Despite the success of deep learning methods in medical image segmentation tasks, the human-level performance relies on massive training data with high-quality annotations, which are expensive and time-consuming to collect. The fact is that there exist low-quality annotations with label noise, which leads to suboptimal performance of learned models. Two prominent directions for segmentation learning with noisy labels include pixel-wise noise robust training and image-level noise robust training. In this work, we propose a novel framework to address segmenting with noisy labels by distilling ef…
Large collections of geo-referenced panoramic images are freely available for cities across the globe, as well as detailed maps with location and meta-data on a great variety of urban objects. They provide a potentially rich source of information on urban objects, but manual annotation for object detection is costly, laborious and difficult. Can we utilize such multimedia sources to automatically annotate street level images as an inexpensive alternative to manual labeling? With the PanorAMS framework we introduce a method to automatically generate bounding box annotations for panoramic images…
Region-Normalized DPO for Medical Image Segmentation under Noisy Judges
Institute for AI in Medicine (IKIM), University Hospital Essen (AöR), Essen, Germany（人工智能医学研究所（IKIM）、埃森大学医院（AöR））；Department of Nuclear Medicine, University Hospital Essen (AöR), Essen, Germany（核医学系、埃森大学医院（AöR））；Department of Physics, TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany（物理系、多特蒙德技术大学）；Heidelberg University Hospital, Heidelberg, Germany（海德堡大学医院）
Nanyang Technological University (NTU)（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Shandong University (SDU)（山东大学）；Joint SDU-NTU Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (C-FAIR)（山东大学-南洋理工大学人工智能联合研究中心）
The existence of noisy labels in real-world data negatively impacts the performance of deep learning models. Although much research effort has been devoted to improving robustness to noisy labels in classification tasks, the problem of noisy labels in deep metric learning (DML) remains open. In this paper, we propose a noise-resistant training technique for DML, which we name Probabilistic Ranking-based Instance Selection with Memory (PRISM). PRISM identifies noisy data in a minibatch using average similarity against image features extracted by several previous versions of the neural network. …
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程技术研究中心）
Learning segmentation from noisy labels is an important task for medical image analysis due to the difficulty in acquiring highquality annotations. Most existing methods neglect the pixel correlation and structural prior in segmentation, often producing noisy predictions around object boundaries. To address this, we adopt a superpixel representation and develop a robust iterative learning strategy that combines noise-aware training of segmentation network and noisy label refinement, both guided by the superpixels. This design enables us to exploit the structural constraints in segmentation lab…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）
Learning accurate object detectors often requires large-scale training data with precise object bounding boxes. However, labeling such data is expensive and time-consuming. As the crowd-sourcing labeling process and the ambiguities of the objects may raise noisy bounding box annotations, the object detectors will suffer from the degenerated training data. In this work, we aim to address the challenge of learning robust object detectors with inaccurate bounding boxes. Inspired by the fact that localization precision suffers significantly from inaccurate bounding boxes while classification accur…
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China（中国北京清华大学电子工程系）；Institute for Precision Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China（中国北京清华大学精准医学研究院）
Deep learning methods have achieved promising performance in many areas, but they are still struggling with noisy-labeled images during the training process. Considering that the annotation quality indispensably relies on great expertise, the problem is even more crucial in the medical image domain. How to eliminate the disturbance from noisy labels for segmentation tasks without further annotations is still a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce our label quality evaluation strategy for deep neural networks automatically assessing the quality of each label, which is not explicit…
Semantic video segmentation is a key challenge for various applications. This paper presents a new model named Noisy-LSTM, which is trainable in an end-to-end manner, with convolutional LSTMs (ConvLSTMs) to leverage the temporal coherency in video frames. We also present a simple yet effective training strategy, which replaces a frame in video sequence with noises. This strategy spoils the temporal coherency in video frames during training and thus makes the temporal links in ConvLSTMs unreliable, which may consequently improve feature extraction from video frames, as well as serve as a regula…
Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Analysis and Mining, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学交通数据分析与挖掘北京市重点实验室）
This paper addresses semi-supervised semantic segmentation by exploiting a small set of images with pixel-level annotations (strong supervisions) and a large set of images with only image-level annotations (weak supervisions). Most existing approaches aim to generate accurate pixel-level labels from weak supervisions. However, we observe that those generated labels still inevitably contain noisy labels. Motivated by this observation, we present a novel perspective and formulate this task as a problem of learning with pixel-level label noise. Existing noisy label methods, nevertheless, mainly a…
In this work we study the impact of noise on the training of object detection networks for the medical domain, and how it can be mitigated by improving the training procedure. Annotating large medical datasets for training data-hungry deep learning models is expensive and time consuming. Leveraging information that is already collected in clinical practice, in the form of text reports, bookmarks or lesion measurements would substantially reduce this cost. Obtaining precise lesion bounding boxes through automatic mining procedures, however, is difficult. We provide here a quantitative evaluatio…
From Noisy Labels to Intrinsic Structure: A Geometric-Structural Dual-Guided Framework for Noise-Robust Medical Image Segmentation
College of physics；information engineering, Fuzhou University, Xueyuan Road No.2, Fuzhou, 350108, China；Bioengineering Department；Imperial-X, Imperial College London, London W12 7SL, UK；Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK；Cardiovascular Research Centre, Royal Brompton Hospital, London SW3 6NP, UK；School of Biomedical Engineering \& Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK；Faculty of Applied Science, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao Special Administrative Region of China
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Images can give us insights into the contextual meanings of words, but current image-text grounding approaches require detailed annotations. Such granular annotation is rare, expensive, and unavailable in most domain-specific contexts. In contrast, unlabeled multi-image, multi-sentence documents are abundant. Can lexical grounding be learned from such documents, even though they have significant lexical and visual overlap? Working with a case study dataset of real estate listings, we demonstrate the challenge of distinguishing highly correlated grounded terms, such as "kitchen" and "bedroom", …
Emerging Semantic Segmentation from Positive and Negative Coarse Label Learning
Big Data Institute, Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery（大数据研究所，李嘉树健康信息与发现中心）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Nuffield Department of Population Health（人口健康部门）；Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences（临床神经科学部门）；Department of Engineering Science（工程科学系）；School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Physical Sciences（工程学院，工程与物理科学学院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
In this work, we attempt the segmentation of cardiac structures in late gadolinium-enhanced (LGE) magnetic resonance images (MRI) using only minimal supervision in a two-step approach. In the first step, we register a small set of five LGE cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images with ground truth labels to a set of 40 target LGE CMR images without annotation. Each manually annotated ground truth provides labels of the myocardium and the left ventricle (LV) and right ventricle (RV) cavities, which are used as atlases. After multi-atlas label fusion by majority voting, we possess noisy labels fo…
YoloCurvSeg: You Only Label One Noisy Skeleton for Vessel-style Curvilinear Structure Segmentation
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；the University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Jiaxing Research Institute, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学嘉兴研究院）
Noisy labels are commonly found in real-world data, which cause performance degradation of deep neural networks. Cleaning data manually is labour-intensive and time-consuming. Previous research mostly focuses on enhancing classification models against noisy labels, while the robustness of deep metric learning (DML) against noisy labels remains less well-explored. In this paper, we bridge this important gap by proposing Probabilistic Ranking-based Instance Selection with Memory (PRISM) approach for DML. PRISM calculates the probability of a label being clean, and filters out potentially noisy s…
Manual annotation of soiling on surround view cameras is a very challenging and expensive task. The unclear boundary for various soiling categories like water drops or mud particles usually results in a large variance in the annotation quality. As a result, the models trained on such poorly annotated data are far from being optimal. In this paper, we focus on handling such noisy annotations via pseudo-label driven ensemble model which allow us to quickly spot problematic annotations and in most cases also sufficiently fixing them. We train a soiling segmentation model on both noisy and refined…
We propose AutoCorrect, a method to automatically learn object-annotation alignments from a dataset with annotations affected by geometric noise. The method is based on a consistency loss that enables deep neural networks to be trained, given only noisy annotations as input, to correct the annotations. When some noise-free annotations are available, we show that the consistency loss reduces to a stricter self-supervised loss. We also show that the method can implicitly leverage object symmetries to reduce the ambiguity arising in correcting noisy annotations. When multiple object-annotation pa…
Though analysis of Medical Images by Deep Learning achieves unprecedented results across various applications, the effect of \emph{noisy training annotations} is rarely studied in a systematic manner. In Medical Image Analysis, most reports addressing this question concentrate on studying segmentation performance of deep learning classifiers. The absence of continuous ground truth annotations in these studies limits the value of conclusions for applications, where regression is the primary method of choice. In the application of surgical instrument pose estimation, where precision has a direct…
Cross-head Supervision for Crowd Counting with Noisy Annotations
1 Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, School of Computer Science 2 Institute of Science；Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Human emotions can be inferred from facial expressions. However, the annotations of facial expressions are often highly noisy in common emotion coding models, including categorical and dimensional ones. To reduce human labelling effort on multi-task labels, we introduce a new problem of facial emotion recognition with noisy multi-task annotations. For this new problem, we suggest a formulation from the point of joint distribution match view, which aims at learning more reliable correlations among raw facial images and multi-task labels, resulting in the reduction of noise influence. In our for…
We present an approach to effectively use millions of images with noisy annotations in conjunction with a small subset of cleanly-annotated images to learn powerful image representations. One common approach to combine clean and noisy data is to first pre-train a network using the large noisy dataset and then fine-tune with the clean dataset. We show this approach does not fully leverage the information contained in the clean set. Thus, we demonstrate how to use the clean annotations to reduce the noise in the large dataset before fine-tuning the network using both the clean set and the full s…
Learning semantic image quality for fetal ultrasound from noisy ranking annotation
DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学DTU计算学院）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Copenhagen Academy of Medical Education and Simulation (CAMES), Rigshospitalet（哥本哈根医学教育与模拟学院（CAMES），国立医院（Rigshospitalet））；Pioneer Centre for AI, Copenhagen（哥本哈根人工智能先锋中心）
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Peking Union Medical College Hospital（北京协和医院）
The segmentation of coronary arteries in X-ray angiograms by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is promising yet limited by the requirement of precisely annotating all pixels in a large number of training images, which is extremely labor-intensive especially for complex coronary trees. To alleviate the burden on the annotator, we propose a novel weakly supervised training framework that learns from noisy pseudo labels generated from automatic vessel enhancement, rather than accurate labels obtained by fully manual annotation. A typical self-paced learning scheme is used to make the training …
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
When human annotators are given a choice about what to label in an image, they apply their own subjective judgments on what to ignore and what to mention. We refer to these noisy "human-centric" annotations as exhibiting human reporting bias. Examples of such annotations include image tags and keywords found on photo sharing sites, or in datasets containing image captions. In this paper, we use these noisy annotations for learning visually correct image classifiers. Such annotations do not use consistent vocabulary, and miss a significant amount of the information present in an image; however,…
Kiel University（基尔大学）；Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut（弗里德里希·勒夫勒研究所）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Rzeszow University of Technology（热舒夫理工大学）；University Bonn（波恩大学）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Natural Resources Institute Finland（芬兰自然资源研究所）；University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover（汉诺威兽医大学）
High-quality data is necessary for modern machine learning. However, the acquisition of such data is difficult due to noisy and ambiguous annotations of humans. The aggregation of such annotations to determine the label of an image leads to a lower data quality. We propose a data-centric image classification benchmark with ten real-world datasets and multiple annotations per image to allow researchers to investigate and quantify the impact of such data quality issues. With the benchmark we can study the impact of annotation costs and (semi-)supervised methods on the data quality for image clas…
The real-world facial expression recognition (FER) datasets suffer from noisy annotations due to crowd-sourcing, ambiguity in expressions, the subjectivity of annotators and inter-class similarity. However, the recent deep networks have strong capacity to memorize the noisy annotations leading to corrupted feature embedding and poor generalization. To handle noisy annotations, we propose a dynamic FER learning framework (DNFER) in which clean samples are selected based on dynamic class specific threshold during training. Specifically, DNFER is based on supervised training using selected clean …
Presence of noise in the labels of large scale facial expression datasets has been a key challenge towards Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild. During early learning stage, deep networks fit on clean data. Then, eventually, they start overfitting on noisy labels due to their memorization ability, which limits FER performance. This work proposes an effective training strategy in the presence of noisy labels, called as Consensual Collaborative Training (CCT) framework. CCT co-trains three networks jointly using a convex combination of supervision loss and consistency loss, without ma…
