Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting. Code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/Co-mining.
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；MEGVII Technology（旷视科技）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京智源人工智能研究院）
Sparsely annotated semantic segmentation (SASS) aims to train a segmentation network with coarse-grained (i.e., point-, scribble-, and block-wise) supervisions, where only a small proportion of pixels are labeled in each image. In this paper, we propose a novel tree energy loss for SASS by providing semantic guidance for unlabeled pixels. The tree energy loss represents images as minimum spanning trees to model both low-level and high-level pair-wise affinities. By sequentially applying these affinities to the network prediction, soft pseudo labels for unlabeled pixels are generated in a coars…
Semantic segmentation based on sparse annotation has advanced in recent years. It labels only part of each object in the image, leaving the remainder unlabeled. Most of the existing approaches are time-consuming and often necessitate a multi-stage training strategy. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective sparse annotated semantic segmentation framework based on segformer, dubbed SASFormer, that achieves remarkable performance. Specifically, the framework first generates hierarchical patch attention maps, which are then multiplied by the network predictions to produce correlated region…
Efficient and reliable methods for training of object detectors are in higher demand than ever, and more and more data relevant to the field is becoming available. However, large datasets like Open Images Dataset v4 (OID) are sparsely annotated, and some measure must be taken in order to ensure the training of a reliable detector. In order to take the incompleteness of these datasets into account, one possibility is to use pretrained models to detect the presence of the unverified objects. However, the performance of such a strategy depends largely on the power of the pretrained model. In this…
Although many approaches for multi-human pose estimation in videos have shown profound results, they require densely annotated data which entails excessive man labor. Furthermore, there exists occlusion and motion blur that inevitably lead to poor estimation performance. To address these problems, we propose a method that leverages an attention mask for occluded joints and encodes temporal dependency between frames using transformers. First, our framework composes different combinations of sparsely annotated frames that denote the track of the overall joint movement. We propose an occlusion at…
In training object detector based on convolutional neural networks, selection of effective positive examples for training is an important factor. However, when training an anchor-based detectors with sparse annotations on an image, effort to find effective positive examples can hinder training performance. When using the anchor-based training for the ground truth bounding box to collect positive examples under given IoU, it is often possible to include objects from other classes in the current training class, or objects that are needed to be trained can only be sampled as negative examples. We…
Fully supervised object detection requires training images in which all instances are annotated. This is actually impractical due to the high labor and time costs and the unavoidable missing annotations. As a result, the incomplete annotation in each image could provide misleading supervision and harm the training. Recent works on sparsely annotated object detection alleviate this problem by generating pseudo labels for the missing annotations. Such a mechanism is sensitive to the threshold of the pseudo label score. However, the effective threshold is different in different training stages an…
Unified Unsupervised and Sparsely-Supervised 3D Object Detection by Semantic Pseudo-Labeling and Prototype Learning
Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医疗机器人研究院）；Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China（系统控制与信息处理教育部重点实验室）
European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS), University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学欧洲非线性光谱实验室）；Bioretics SrL（Bioretics SrL公司）；National Institute of Optics, National Research Council (INO-CNR)（国家研究委员会国家光学研究所）；Department of Physics（物理系）
Semantic segmentation of neuronal structures in 3D high-resolution fluorescence microscopy imaging of the human brain cortex can take advantage of bidimensional CNNs, which yield good results in neuron localization but lead to inaccurate surface reconstruction. 3D CNNs, on the other hand, would require manually annotated volumetric data on a large scale and hence considerable human effort. Semi-supervised alternative strategies which make use only of sparse annotations suffer from longer training times and achieved models tend to have increased capacity compared to 2D CNNs, needing more ground…
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Learning from a few training samples is a desirable ability of an object detector, inspiring the explorations of Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD). Most existing approaches employ a pretrain-transfer paradigm. The model is first pre-trained on base classes with abundant data and then transferred to novel classes with a few annotated samples. Despite the substantial progress, the FSOD performance is still far behind satisfactory. During pre-training, due to the co-occurrence between base and novel classes, the model is learned to treat the co-occurred novel classes as backgrounds. During transfe…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Jilin University（吉林大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Object detection under imperfect data receives great attention recently. Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) suffers from severe localization issues due to the lack of instance-level annotation, while semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) remains challenging led by the inter-image discrepancy between labeled and unlabeled data. In this study, we propose the Single Instance annotated Object Detection (SIOD), requiring only one instance annotation for each existing category in an image. Degraded from inter-task (WSOD) or inter-image (SSOD) discrepancies to the intra-image discrepancy, SI…
SP3D: Boosting Sparsely-Supervised 3D Object Detection via Accurate Cross-Modal Semantic Prompts
Fujian Key Laboratory of Sensing and Computing for Smart Cities, Xiamen University（厦门大学福建省智慧城市感知与计算重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University（厦门大学多媒体可信感知与高效计算教育部重点实验室）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Though quite challenging, leveraging large-scale unlabeled or partially labeled data in learning systems (e.g., model/classifier training) has attracted increasing attentions due to its fundamental importance. To address this problem, many active learning (AL) methods have been proposed that employ up-to-date detectors to retrieve representative minority samples according to predefined confidence or uncertainty thresholds. However, these AL methods cause the detectors to ignore the remaining majority samples (i.e., those with low uncertainty or high prediction confidence). In this work, by dev…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；University of North Carolina（北卡罗来纳大学）
Our work introduces a novel way to increase pose estimation accuracy by discovering parts from unannotated regions of training images. Discovered parts are used to generate more accurate appearance likelihoods for traditional part-based models like Pictorial Structures [13] and its derivatives. Our experiments on images of a hawkmoth in flight show that our proposed approach significantly improves over existing work [27] for this application, while also being more generally applicable. Our proposed approach localizes landmarks at least twice as accurately as a baseline based on a Mixture of Pi…
The Endoscapes Dataset for Surgical Scene Segmentation, Object Detection, and Critical View of Safety Assessment: Official Splits and Benchmark
ICube, University of Strasbourg, CNRS（ICube，斯特拉斯堡大学，CNRS）；IHU Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡IHU）；Institute for Research against Digestive Cancer (IRCAD)（消化道癌症研究所）；Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS（A.Gemelli大学附属医院）
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to segment the target objects in query under the condition of a few annotated support images. Most previous works strive to mine more effective category information from the support to match with the corresponding objects in query. However, they all ignored the category information gap between query and support images. If the objects in them show large intra-class diversity, forcibly migrating the category information from the support to the query is ineffective. To solve this problem, we are the first to introduce an intermediate prototype for mining both d…
Are Dense Labels Always Necessary for 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud?
School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, the Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yatsen University（南方科技大学深圳校区智能系统工程学院）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics and Ministry of Education Key Lab of Intelligent Networks and Network Security, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学数学与统计学系和教育部智能网络与网络安全重点实验室）；School of Communication and Information Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）；Meta；University of Maryland（美国马里兰大学）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；DarkMatter AI Research（暗物质人工智能研究院）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳）深圳大数据研究院）；Megvii Technology（旷视科技）
Deep learning-based video salient object detection has recently achieved great success with its performance significantly outperforming any other unsupervised methods. However, existing data-driven approaches heavily rely on a large quantity of pixel-wise annotated video frames to deliver such promising results. In this paper, we address the semi-supervised video salient object detection task using pseudo-labels. Specifically, we present an effective video saliency detector that consists of a spatial refinement network and a spatiotemporal module. Based on the same refinement network and motio…
Object-Scene-Camera Decomposition and Recomposition for Data-Efficient Monocular 3D Object Detection
Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics（人工智能与机器人研究院）；Xi'an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Intelligent Transportation Thrust of the Systems Hub（系统枢纽智能交通事业部）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)（香港科技大学（广州））；Amazon Alexa AI（亚马逊Alexa AI）
Not Just Learning from Others but Relying on Yourself: A New Perspective on Few-Shot Segmentation in Remote Sensing
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Mass flow estimation is of great importance to several industries, and it can be quite challenging to obtain accurate estimates due to limitation in expense or general infeasibility. In the context of agricultural applications, yield monitoring is a key component to precision agriculture and mass flow is the critical factor to measure. Measuring mass flow allows for field productivity analysis, cost minimization, and adjustments to machine efficiency. Methods such as volume or force-impact have been used to measure mass flow; however, these methods are limited in application and accuracy. In t…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国高等科学技术院（KAIST））
Semantic segmentation algorithms require access to well-annotated datasets captured under diverse illumination conditions to ensure consistent performance. However, poor visibility conditions at varying illumination conditions result in laborious and error-prone labeling. Alternatively, using synthetic samples to train segmentation algorithms has gained interest with the drawback of domain gap that results in sub-optimal performance. While current state-of-the-art (SoTA) have proposed different mechanisms to bridge the domain gap, they still perform poorly in low illumination conditions with a…
Pulmonary embolisms (PE) are known to be one of the leading causes for cardiac-related mortality. Due to inherent variabilities in how PE manifests and the cumbersome nature of manual diagnosis, there is growing interest in leveraging AI tools for detecting PE. In this paper, we build a two-stage detection pipeline that is accurate, computationally efficient, robust to variations in PE types and kernels used for CT reconstruction, and most importantly, does not require dense annotations. Given the challenges in acquiring expert annotations in large-scale datasets, our approach produces state-o…
National Institutes of Health Clinical Center（美国国立卫生研究院临床中心）
Extracting, harvesting and building large-scale annotated radiological image datasets is a greatly important yet challenging problem. It is also the bottleneck to designing more effective data-hungry computing paradigms (e.g., deep learning) for medical image analysis. Yet, vast amounts of clinical annotations (usually associated with disease image findings and marked using arrows, lines, lesion diameters, segmentation, etc.) have been collected over several decades and stored in hospitals' Picture Archiving and Communication Systems. In this paper, we mine and harvest one major type of clinic…
To obtain 3D annotations, we are restricted to controlled environments or synthetic datasets, leading us to 3D datasets with less generalizability to real-world scenarios. To tackle this issue in the context of semi-supervised 3D hand shape and pose estimation, we propose the Pose Alignment network to propagate 3D annotations from labelled frames to nearby unlabelled frames in sparsely annotated videos. We show that incorporating the alignment supervision on pairs of labelled-unlabelled frames allows us to improve the pose estimation accuracy. Besides, we show that the proposed Pose Alignment …
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；BIOSS Centre for Biological Signalling Studies（BIOSS生物信号研究中心）；University Medical Center Freiburg（弗莱堡大学医学中心）；University Hospital Freiburg（弗莱堡大学医院）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）
This paper introduces a network for volumetric segmentation that learns from sparsely annotated volumetric images. We outline two attractive use cases of this method: (1) In a semi-automated setup, the user annotates some slices in the volume to be segmented. The network learns from these sparse annotations and provides a dense 3D segmentation. (2) In a fully-automated setup, we assume that a representative, sparsely annotated training set exists. Trained on this data set, the network densely segments new volumetric images. The proposed network extends the previous u-net architecture from Ronn…
Multi-atlas segmentation is a widely used tool in medical image analysis, providing robust and accurate results by learning from annotated atlas datasets. However, the availability of fully annotated atlas images for training is limited due to the time required for the labelling task. Segmentation methods requiring only a proportion of each atlas image to be labelled could therefore reduce the workload on expert raters tasked with annotating atlas images. To address this issue, we first re-examine the labelling problem common in many existing approaches and formulate its solution in terms of a…
Video analysis has been moving towards more detailed interpretation (e.g. segmentation) with encouraging progresses. These tasks, however, increasingly rely on densely annotated training data both in space and time. Since such annotation is labour-intensive, few densely annotated video data with detailed region boundaries exist. This work aims to resolve this dilemma by learning to automatically generate region boundaries for all frames of a video from sparsely annotated bounding boxes of target regions. We achieve this with a Volumetric Graph Convolutional Network (VGCN), which learns to iter…
Facebook AI（脸书人工智能）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Modern approaches for multi-person pose estimation in video require large amounts of dense annotations. However, labeling every frame in a video is costly and labor intensive. To reduce the need for dense annotations, we propose a PoseWarper network that leverages training videos with sparse annotations (every k frames) to learn to perform dense temporal pose propagation and estimation. Given a pair of video frames---a labeled Frame A and an unlabeled Frame B---we train our model to predict human pose in Frame A using the features from Frame B by means of deformable convolutions to implicitly …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Universidad Catolica de Chile（智利天主教大学）
A key aspect of VQA models that are interpretable is their ability to ground their answers to relevant regions in the image. Current approaches with this capability rely on supervised learning and human annotated groundings to train attention mechanisms inside the VQA architecture. Unfortunately, obtaining human annotations specific for visual grounding is difficult and expensive. In this work, we demonstrate that we can effectively train a VQA architecture with grounding supervision that can be automatically obtained from available region descriptions and object annotations. We also show that…
Saratoga High School（萨拉托加高中）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Chest X-rays of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients are frequently obtained to determine the extent of lung disease and are a valuable source of data for creating artificial intelligence models. Most work to date assessing disease severity on chest imaging has focused on segmenting computed tomography (CT) images; however, given that CTs are performed much less frequently than chest X-rays for COVID-19 patients, automated lung lesion segmentation on chest X-rays could be clinically valuable. There currently exists a universal shortage of chest X-rays with ground truth COVID-19 lung le…
Action recognition is so far mainly focusing on the problem of classification of hand selected preclipped actions and reaching impressive results in this field. But with the performance even ceiling on current datasets, it also appears that the next steps in the field will have to go beyond this fully supervised classification. One way to overcome those problems is to move towards less restricted scenarios. In this context we present a large-scale real-world dataset designed to evaluate learning techniques for human action recognition beyond hand-crafted datasets. To this end we put the proces…
Weakly-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation with SAM-based Pseudo Labeling and Multi-scale Feature Grouping
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）；Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Tianyi Traffic Technology（天翼交通科技）
针对弱监督伪装目标分割中内在相似性和弱监督的挑战，提出基于多尺度特征分组模块和 SAM 伪标签生成及优化策略的新方法，实现了最先进的分割性能。
In traffic engineering, vehicle detectors are trained on limited datasets resulting in poor accuracy when deployed in real world applications. Annotating large-scale high quality datasets is challenging. Typically, these datasets have limited diversity; they do not reflect the real-world operating environment. There is a need for a large-scale, cloud based positive and negative mining (PNM) process and a large-scale learning and evaluation system for the application of traffic event detection. The proposed positive and negative mining process addresses the quality of crowd sourced ground truth…
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；Vanderbilt University Medical Center（范德堡大学医学中心）
The quantitative detection, segmentation, and characterization of glomeruli from high-resolution whole slide imaging (WSI) play essential roles in the computer-assisted diagnosis and scientific research in digital renal pathology. Historically, such comprehensive quantification requires extensive programming skills in order to be able to handle heterogeneous and customized computational tools. To bridge the gap of performing glomerular quantification for non-technical users, we develop the Glo-In-One toolkit to achieve holistic glomerular detection, segmentation, and characterization via a sin…
Recently, learning from vast unlabeled data, especially self-supervised learning, has been emerging and attracted widespread attention. Self-supervised learning followed by the supervised fine-tuning on a few labeled examples can significantly improve label efficiency and outperform standard supervised training using fully annotated data. In this work, we present a novel self-supervised deep learning paradigm based on online hard negative pair mining. Specifically, we design a student-teacher network to generate multi-view of the data for self-supervised learning and integrate hard negative pa…
