Is object localization for free? – Weakly-supervised learning with convolutional neural networks

Abstract

International audienceSuccessful methods for visual object recognition typically rely on training datasets containing lots of richly annotatedimages. Detailed image annotation, e.g. by object bounding boxes, however, is both expensive and often subjective.We describe a weakly supervised convolutional neural network (CNN) for object classification that relies onlyon image-level labels, yet can learn from cluttered scenes containing multiple objects. We quantify its object classification and object location prediction performance on the Pascal VOC 2012 (20 object classes) and the much larger Microsoft COCO (80 object classes) datasets. We find that the network (i) outputs accurate image-level labels, (ii) predicts approximate locations (but not extents) of objects, and (iii) performs comparably to its fully-supervised counterparts using object bounding box annotation for training