Relational Matching for Weakly Semi-Supervised Oriented Object Detection

Oriented object detection has witnessed significant progress in recent years. However the impressive performance of oriented object detectors is at the huge cost of labor-intensive annotations and deteriorates once the annotated data becomes limited. Semi-supervised learning in which sufficient unannotated data are utilized to enhance the base detector is a promising method to address the annotation deficiency problem. Motivated by weakly supervised learning we introduce annotation-efficient point annotations for unannotated images and propose a weakly semi-supervised method for oriented object detection to balance the detection performance and annotation cost. Specifically we propose a Rotation-Modulated Relational Graph Matching method to match relations of proposals centered on annotated points between different models to alleviate the ambiguity of point annotations in depicting the oriented object. In addition we further propose a Relational Rank Distribution Matching method to align the rank distribution on classification and regression between different models. Finally to handle the difficult annotated points that both models are confused about we introduce weakly supervised learning to impose positive signals for difficult point-induced clusters to the base model and focus the base model on the occupancy between the predictions and annotated points. We perform extensive experiments on challenging datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed weakly semi-supervised method in effectively leveraging unannotated data for significant performance improvement. ©2024 IEEE.