Generative Adversarial Learning Towards Fast Weakly Supervised Detection

Weakly supervised object detection has attracted extensive research efforts in recent years. Without the need of annotating bounding boxes, the existing methods usually follow a two/multi-stage pipeline with an online compulsive stage to extract object proposals, which is an order of magnitude slower than fast fully supervised object detectors such as SSD [31] and YOLO [34]. In this paper, we speedup online weakly supervised object detectors by orders of magnitude by proposing a novel generative adversarial learning paradigm. In the proposed paradigm, the generator is a one-stage object detector to generate bounding boxes from images. To guide the learning of object-level generator, a surrogator is introduced to mine high-quality bounding boxes for training. We further adapt a structural similarity loss in combination with an adversarial loss into the training objective, which solves the challenge that the bounding boxes produced by the surrogator may not well capture their ground truth. Our one-stage detector outperforms all existing schemes in terms of detection accuracy, running at 118 frames per second, which is up to 438× faster than the state-of-the-art weakly supervised detectors [8, 30, 15, 27, 45]. The code will be available publicly soon.