ALMUS: Enhancing Active Learning for Object Detection with Metric-Based Uncertainty Sampling

Object detection is critical in computer vision but often requires large amounts of labeled data for effective training. Active learning (AL) has emerged as a promising solution to reduce the annotation burden by selecting the most informative samples for labeling. However, existing AL methods for object detection primarily focus on uncertainty sampling, which may not effectively balance the dual challenges of classification and localization. In this study, we explore active learning for object detection, with the objective of optimizing model performance while substantially reducing the demand for annotated data. We propose a novel Active Learning with Metric-based Uncertainty Sampling (ALMUS) that works effectively for the object detection task. This approach prioritizes selecting images containing objects from categories where the model exhibits suboptimal performance, as determined by category-specific evaluation metrics. To balance the annotation budget across different object classes, we propose a dynamic allocation strategy that considers the difficulty of each class and the distribution of object instances within the dataset. This combination of strategies enables our method to effectively address the dual challenges of classification and localization in object detection tasks while still focusing on the rarest and most challenging classes. We conduct extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets, demonstrating that our method outperforms several active learning baselines. Our results indicate that the proposed approach enhances model performance and accelerates convergence, making it a valuable contribution to the field of active learning in object detection.