Active Learning for Object Detection With Vectorized Dual Pseudo Loss and Multiple Instance Offset Constraint

Existing active learning methods for object detection face challenges, such as the lack of ground truth labels for regression loss, insufficient representation of unlabeled instance samples information, and discrepancies in information quality between image-level and multiple anchor-level instances. To address these issues, we propose an active learning method for object detection with vectorized dual pseudo loss and multiple instance offset constraint. This method implements a two-stage framework. The first stage focuses on evaluating the information quality of detection images. We first pioneer a dual pseudo loss formulation that provides theoretically grounded regression loss estimation. The regression loss is calculated as the norm of the offset discrepancy loss vector between the enhanced and original base box vector, further constrained by the cosine value of the angle between the anchor box feature and regressor parameters vector. The distance entropy from the base box feature vector to each category’s feature prototype vector is used as a weighting factor for the regression and classification information quality of instance samples. Subsequently, the second stage employs diversity-driven sampling on high-information images, leveraging instance-level cosine similarity to effectively remove redundant images. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art active learning approaches for object detection on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets. Additionally, the proposed dual pseudo regression loss robustly captures regression information quality, demonstrating its effectiveness for active learning in object detection.