Dynamic pseudo-label generation for weakly supervised object detection in remote sensing images

Abstract

In recent years, fully supervised object detection methods in remote sensing images with good performance have been developed. However, this approach requires a large number of instance-level annotated samples that are relatively expensive to acquire. Therefore, weakly supervised learning using only image-level annotations has attracted much attention. Most of the weakly supervised object detection methods are based on multi-instance learning methods, and their performance depends on the process of scoring the candidate region proposals during training. In this process, the use of only image-level labels for supervision usually cannot obtain optimal results due to the lack of location information of the object. To address the above problem, a dynamic sample pseudo-label generation framework is proposed to generate pseudo-labels for each proposal without additional annotations. First, we propose the pseudo-label generation algorithm (PLG) to generate the category labels of the proposal by using the localization information of the object. Specifically, we propose to use the pixel average of the object’s localization map in the proposal as the proposal category confidence and calculate the pseudo-label by comparing the proposal category confidence with the preset threshold. In addition, an effective adaptive threshold selection strategy is designed to eliminate the effect of different category shape differences in computing sample pseudolabels. Comparative experiments on the NWPU VHR-10 dataset demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the detection performance compared to existing methods.