End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection With Soft Teacher

Mengde Xu, Zheng Zhang, Han Hu, Jianfeng Wang, Lijuan Wang, Fangyun Wei, Xiang Bai, Zicheng Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 3060-3069

Previous pseudo-label approaches for semi-supervised object detection typically follow a multi-stage schema, with the first stage to train an initial detector on a few labeled data, followed by the pseudo labeling and re-training stage on unlabeled data. These multi-stage methods complicate the training, and also hinder the use of improved detectors for more accurate pseudo-labeling. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approach to simultaneously improve the detector and pseudo labels gradually for semi-supervised object detection. The pseudo labels are generated on the fly by a teacher model which is an aggregated version of the student detector at different steps. As the detector becomes stronger during the training, the teacher detector's performance improves and the pseudo labels tend to be more accurate, which further benefits the detector training. Within the end-to-end training, we present two simple yet effective techniques: weigh the classification loss of unlabeled images through soft teacher and select reliable pseudo boxes for regression through box jittering. Experimentally, the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on MS-COCO benchmark by using Faster R-CNN with ResNet-50 and FPN, reaching 20.5 mAP, 30.7 mAP and 34.0 mAP with 1%, 5%, 10% labeled data, respectively. Moreover, the proposed approach also proves to improve this detector trained on the COCO full set by +1.8 mAP by leveraging additional unlabelled data of COCO, achieving 42.7 mAP.