Learning to localize objects with minimal supervision is an important problem in computer vision, since large fully annotated datasets are extremely costly to obtain. In this paper, we propose a new method that achieves this goal with only image-level labels of whether the objects are present or not. Our approach combines a discriminative submodular cover problem for automatically discovering a set of positive object windows with a smoothed latent SVM formulation. The latter allows us to leverage efficient quasi-Newton optimization techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach provides a 50 relative improvement in mean average precision over the current state-of-the-art on PASCAL VOC 2007 detection.
@cite_5: Purely bottom-up, unsupervised segmentation of a single image into foreground and background regions remains a challenging task for computer vision. Co-segmentation is the problem of simultaneously dividing multiple images into regions (segments) corresponding to different object classes. In this paper, we combine existing tools for bottom-up image segmentation such as normalized cuts, with kernel methods commonly used in object recognition. These two sets of techniques are used within a discriminative clustering framework: the goal is to assign foreground background labels jointly to all images, so that a supervised classifier trained with these labels leads to maximal separation of the two classes. In practice, we obtain a combinatorial optimization problem which is relaxed to a continuous convex optimization problem, that can itself be solved efficiently for up to dozens of images. We illustrate the proposed method on images with very similar foreground objects, as well as on more challenging problems with objects with higher intra-class variations.
@cite_15: 
@cite_10: A conventional approach to learning object detectors uses fully supervised learning techniques which assumes that a training image set with manual annotation of object bounding boxes are provided. The manual annotation of objects in large image sets is tedious and unreliable. Therefore, a weakly supervised learning approach is desirable, where the training set needs only binary labels regarding whether an image contains the target object class. In the weakly supervised approach a detector is used to iteratively annotate the training set and learn the object model. We present a novel weakly supervised learning framework for learning an object detector. Our framework incorporates a new initial annotation model to start the iterative learning of a detector and a model drift detection method that is able to detect and stop the iterative learning when the detector starts to drift away from the objects of interest. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the challenging PASCAL 2007 dataset.
@cite_4: We propose a novel approach to annotating weakly labelled data. In contrast to many existing approaches that perform annotation by seeking clusters of self-similar exemplars (minimising intra-class variance), we perform image annotation by selecting exemplars that have never occurred before in the much larger, and strongly annotated, negative training set (maximising inter-class variance). Compared to existing methods, our approach is fast, robust, and obtains state of the art results on two challenging data-sets --- voc2007 (all poses), and the msr2 action data-set, where we obtain a 10 increase. Moreover, this use of negative mining complements existing methods, that seek to minimize the intra-class variance, and can be readily integrated with many of them.
More recent work, such as @cite_10 @cite_4 , attempts to learn detectors, or simply automatically generate bounding box annotations from much more challenging datasets such as PASCAL VOC @cite_15 . In this data regime, focusing on initialization is crucial and carefully designed heuristics, such as shrinking bounding boxes @cite_5 , are often employed.