Unsupervised object detection with scene-adaptive concept learning

Abstract

Object detection is one of the hottest research directions in computer vision, has already made impressive progress in academia, and has many valuable applications in the industry. However, the mainstream detection methods still have two shortcomings: (1) even a model that is well trained using large amounts of data still cannot generally be used across different kinds of scenes; (2) once a model is deployed, it cannot autonomously evolve along with the accumulated unlabeled scene data. To address these problems, and inspired by visual knowledge theory, we propose a novel scene-adaptive evolution unsupervised video object detection algorithm that can decrease the impact of scene changes through the concept of object groups. We first extract a large number of object proposals from unlabeled data through a pre-trained detection model. Second, we build the visual knowledge dictionary of object concepts by clustering the proposals, in which each cluster center represents an object prototype. Third, we look into the relations between different clusters and the object information of different groups, and propose a graph-based group information propagation strategy to determine the category of an object concept, which can effectively distinguish positive and negative proposals. With these pseudo labels, we can easily fine-tune the pre-trained model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by performing different experiments, and the significant improvements are achieved.