Semi-supervised boosting using visual similarity learning

The required amount of labeled training data for object detection and classification is a major drawback of current methods. Combining labeled and unlabeled data via semi-supervised learning holds the promise to ease the tedious and time consuming labeling effort. This paper presents a novel semi-supervised learning method which combines the power of learned similarity functions and classifiers. The approach capable of exploiting both labeled and unlabeled data is formulated in a boosting framework. One classifier (the learned similarity) serves as a prior which is steadily improved via training a second classifier on labeled and unlabeled samples. We demonstrate the approach on challenging computer vision applications. First, we show how we can train a classifier using only a few labeled samples and many unlabeled data. Second, we improve (specialize) a state-of-the-art detector by using labeled and unlabeled data.