Point-Teaching: Weakly Semi-supervised Object Detection with Point Annotations

Point annotations are considerably more time-efficient than bounding box annotations. However, how to use cheap point annotations to boost the performance of semi-supervised object detection is still an open question. In this work, we present Point-Teaching, a weakly- and semi-supervised object detection framework to fully utilize the point annotations. Specifically, we propose a Hungarian-based point-matching method to generate pseudo labels for point-annotated images. We further propose multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches at the level of images and points to supervise the object detector with point annotations. Finally, we propose a simple data augmentation, named Point-Guided Copy-Paste, to reduce the impact of those unmatched points. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a few datasets and various data regimes. In particular, Point-Teaching outperforms the previous best method Group R-CNN by 3.1 AP with 5% fully labeled data and 2.3 AP with 30% fully labeled data on the MS COCO dataset. We believe that our proposed framework can largely lower the bar of learning accurate object detectors and pave the way for its broader applications. The code is available at https://github.com/YongtaoGe/Point-Teaching.