Foreground Activation Maps for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects with only image-level labels, which has better scalability and practicability than fully supervised methods in the actual deployment. However, with only image-level labels, learning object classification models tends to activate object parts and ignore the whole object, while expanding object parts into the whole object may deteriorate classification performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose foreground activation maps (FAM), whose aim is to optimize object localization and classification jointly via an object-aware attention module and a part-aware attention module in a unified model, where the two tasks can complement and enhance each other. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that can achieve remarkable performance for both tasks by optimizing them jointly via FAM for WSOL. Besides, the designed two modules can effectively highlight foreground objects for localization and discover discriminative parts for classification. Extensive experiments with four backbones on two standard benchmarks demonstrate that our FAM performs favorably against state-of-the-art WSOL methods.