🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the high annotation cost and limited scalability in object detection by proposing a detector-agnostic active learning framework that maintains high detection accuracy while substantially reducing human labeling effort. The approach requires no modifications to model architecture or training procedures, relying solely on inference outputs to select informative samples through a joint consideration of image-level diversity, category distribution imbalance, and instance-level uncertainty. Specifically, a lightweight category-specific classifier generates entropy-based uncertainty scores, which are combined with global image entropy and image similarity metrics to identify high-value unlabeled instances. Extensive experiments on COCO, PASCAL VOC, and BDD100K demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing active learning strategies, offering strong efficiency, broad compatibility across detectors, and practical potential for real-world deployment.
📝 Abstract
Annotating bounding boxes is costly and limits the scalability of object detection. This challenge is compounded by the need to preserve high accuracy while minimizing manual effort in real-world applications. Prior active learning methods often depend on model features or modify detector internals and training schedules, increasing integration overhead. Moreover, they rarely jointly exploit the benefits of image-level signals, class-imbalance cues, and instance-level uncertainty for comprehensive selection. We present Portable Active Learning (PAL), a detector-agnostic, easily portable framework that operates solely on inference outputs. PAL combines class-wise instance uncertainty with image-level diversity to guide data selection. At each round, PAL trains lightweight class-specific logistic classifiers to distinguish true from false positives, producing entropy-based uncertainty scores for proposals. Candidate images are then refined using global image entropy, class diversity, and image similarity, yielding batches that are both informative and diverse. PAL requires no changes to model internals or training pipelines, ensuring broad compatibility across detectors. Extensive experiments on COCO, PASCAL VOC, and BDD100K demonstrate that PAL consistently improves label efficiency and detection accuracy compared to existing active learning baselines, making it a practical solution for scalable and cost-effective deployment of object detection in real-world settings.