RSOD: Reliability-Guided Sonar Image Object Detection with Extremely Limited Labels

TL;DR

This paper introduces RSOD, a reliability-guided teacher-student framework for sonar image object detection that effectively utilizes unlabeled data to achieve high performance with minimal labels.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel pseudo-label strategy and reliability assessment method tailored for sonar images with extremely limited labels.

Findings

RSOD achieves competitive results using only 5% labeled data.

The method effectively leverages unlabeled data for improved detection.

A new sonar dataset was collected for research purposes.

Abstract

Object detection in sonar images is a key technology in underwater detection systems. Compared to natural images, sonar images contain fewer texture details and are more susceptible to noise, making it difficult for non-experts to distinguish subtle differences between classes. This leads to their inability to provide precise annotation data for sonar images. Therefore, designing effective object detection methods for sonar images with extremely limited labels is particularly important. To address this, we propose a teacher-student framework called RSOD, which aims to fully learn the characteristics of sonar images and develop a pseudo-label strategy suitable for these images to mitigate the impact of limited labels. First, RSOD calculates a reliability score by assessing the consistency of the teacher's predictions across different views. To leverage this score, we introduce an object mixed pseudo-label method to tackle the shortage of labeled data in sonar images. Finally, we optimize the performance of the student by implementing a reliability-guided adaptive constraint. By taking full advantage of unlabeled data, the student can perform well even in situations with extremely limited labels. Notably, on the UATD dataset, our method, using only 5% of labeled data, achieves results that can compete against those of our baseline algorithm trained on 100% labeled data. We also collected a new dataset to provide more valuable data for research in the field of sonar.