The availability of a large quantity of labelled training data is crucial for the training of modern object detectors. Hand labelling training data is time consuming and expensive while automatic labelling methods inevitably add unwanted noise to the labels. We examine the effect of different types of label noise on the performance of an object detector. We then show how co-teaching, a method developed for handling noisy labels and previously demonstrated on a classification problem, can be improved to mitigate the effects of label noise in an object detection setting. We illustrate our results using simulated noise on the KITTI dataset and on a vehicle detection task using automatically labelled data.
@cite_10: Current state-of-the-art deep learning systems for visual object recognition and detection use purely supervised training with regularization such as dropout to avoid overfitting. The performance depends critically on the amount of labeled examples, and in current practice the labels are assumed to be unambiguous and accurate. However, this assumption often does not hold; e.g. in recognition, class labels may be missing; in detection, objects in the image may not be localized; and in general, the labeling may be subjective. In this work we propose a generic way to handle noisy and incomplete labeling by augmenting the prediction objective with a notion of consistency. We consider a prediction consistent if the same prediction is made given similar percepts, where the notion of similarity is between deep network features computed from the input data. In experiments we demonstrate that our approach yields substantial robustness to label noise on several datasets. On MNIST handwritten digits, we show that our model is robust to label corruption. On the Toronto Face Database, we show that our model handles well the case of subjective labels in emotion recognition, achieving state-of-the- art results, and can also benefit from unlabeled face images with no modification to our method. On the ILSVRC2014 detection challenge data, we show that our approach extends to very deep networks, high resolution images and structured outputs, and results in improved scalable detection.
If the data already has labels but those labels are noisy there are a number of approaches that have been proposed to reduce the influence of the noise on the training process. Bootstrapping @cite_10 , for example, incorporates the current state of the model into the loss term resulting in down-weighting of the influence of the label for examples for which the model is confident.