A weakly supervised approach for object detection based on Soft-Label Boosting

Object detection is an important and challenging problem in the field of computer vision. Classical object detection approaches such as background subtraction and saliency detection do not require manual collection of training samples, but can be easily affected by noise factors, such as luminance changes and cluttered background. On the other hand, supervised learning based approaches such as Boosting and SVM usually have robust performance, but require substantial human effort to collect and label training samples. This study aims to combine the comparative advantages of both kinds of approaches, and its contributions are two-fold: (i) a weakly supervised approach for object detection, which does not require manual collection and labelling of training samples; (ii) an extension of Boosting algorithm denoted as Soft-Label Boosting, which is able to employ training samples with soft (probabilistic) labels instead of hard (binary) labels. Experimental results show that the proposed weakly supervised approach outperforms the state-of-the-art, and even achieves comparable performance to supervised approaches.