Learning Scene-specific Object Detectors Based on a Generative-Discriminative Model with Minimal Supervision

TL;DR

This paper introduces a minimally supervised, scene-specific object detection framework that uses a generative-discriminative model to improve detection accuracy across multiple scenes with minimal human input.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel bottom-up learning framework that automatically creates scene-specific detectors from minimal initial supervision, utilizing a generative-discriminative model and online optimization.

Findings

Achieves comparable performance to fully supervised methods.

Outperforms existing self-learning methods under varying conditions.

Requires minimal human labeling for detector initialization.

Abstract

One object class may show large variations due to diverse illuminations, backgrounds and camera viewpoints. Traditional object detection methods often perform worse under unconstrained video environments. To address this problem, many modern approaches model deep hierarchical appearance representations for object detection. Most of these methods require a timeconsuming training process on large manual labelling sample set. In this paper, the proposed framework takes a remarkably different direction to resolve the multi-scene detection problem in a bottom-up fashion. First, a scene-specific objector is obtained from a fully autonomous learning process triggered by marking several bounding boxes around the object in the first video frame via a mouse. Here the human labeled training data or a generic detector are not needed. Second, this learning process is conveniently replicated many times in different surveillance scenes and results in particular detectors under various camera viewpoints. Thus, the proposed framework can be employed in multi-scene object detection applications with minimal supervision. Obviously, the initial scene-specific detector, initialized by several bounding boxes, exhibits poor detection performance and is difficult to improve with traditional online learning algorithm. Consequently, we propose Generative-Discriminative model to partition detection response space and assign each partition an individual descriptor that progressively achieves high classification accuracy. A novel online gradual optimized process is proposed to optimize the Generative-Discriminative model and focus on the hard samples.Experimental results on six video datasets show our approach achieves comparable performance to robust supervised methods, and outperforms the state of the art self-learning methods under varying imaging conditions.