Weakly-supervised Discovery of Visual Pattern Configurations

Hyun Oh Song, Yong Jae Lee, Stefanie Jegelka, Trevor Darrell

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27 (NIPS 2014)

The prominence of weakly labeled data gives rise to a growing demand for object detection methods that can cope with minimal supervision. We propose an approach that automatically identifies discriminative configurations of visual patterns that are characteristic of a given object class. We formulate the problem as a constrained submodular optimization problem and demonstrate the benefits of the discovered configurations in remedying mislocalizations and finding informative positive and negative training examples. Together, these lead to state-of-the-art weakly-supervised detection results on the challenging PASCAL VOC dataset.