Solving Missing-Annotation Object Detection with Background Recalibration Loss

This paper focuses on a novel and challenging detection scenario: A majority of true objects/instances is unlabeled in the datasets, so these missing-labeled areas will be regarded as the background during training. Previous art [1] on this problem has proposed to use soft sampling to re-weight the gradients of RoIs based on the overlaps with positive instances, while their method is mainly based on the two-stage detector (i.e. Faster RCNN) which is more robust and friendly for the missing label scenario. In this paper, we introduce a superior solution called Background Recalibration Loss (BRL) that can automatically re-calibrate the loss signals according to the pre-defined IoU threshold and input image. Our design is built on the one-stage detector which is faster and lighter. Inspired by the Focal Loss [2] formulation, we make several significant modifications to fit on the missing-annotation circumstance. We conduct extensive experiments on the curated PASCAL VOC [3] and MS COCO [4] datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the baseline and other state-of-the-arts by a large margin.