Instance-Level Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has received increasing attention in object detection field, because it only requires image-level annotations to indicate the presence or absence of target objects, which greatly reduces the labeling costs. Existing methods usually focus on the current individual image to learn object instance representations, while ignoring instance correlations between different images. To address this problem, we propose an instance-level contrastive learning (ICL) framework to mine reliable instance representations from all learned images, and use the contrastive loss to guide instance representation learning for the current image. Due to the diversity of instances, with different appearances, sizes or shapes, we propose an instance-diverse memory updating (IMU) algorithm to mine different instance representations and store them in a memory bank with multiple representation vectors per class, which also considers background information to enhance foreground representations. With the help of memory bank, we further propose a memory-aware instance mining (MIM) algorithm that combines proposal confidence and instance similarity across images to mine more reliable object instances. In addition, we also propose a memory-aware proposal sampling (MPS) algorithm to sample more positive proposals and remove some negative proposals to balance the learning of positive-negative samples. We conduct extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC2007 and VOC2012 datasets, which are widely used in WSOD, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Compared to our baseline, our method brings [Formula: see text] mAP and [Formula: see text] CorLoc gains on PASCAL VOC2007 dataset, and [Formula: see text] mAP and [Formula: see text] CorLoc gains on PASCAL VOC2012 dataset.