Towards Precise End-to-end Semi-Supervised Human Head Detection Network

Head detection, as a fundamental task in practice for many head-related problems, requires an enormous number of annotated boxes to maintain the performance. To alleviate the time and cost of labeling each image in the dataset, we propose an end-to-end semi-supervised head detection frame-work, which shows competitive results with only a small set of data. Specifically, under the setting of semi-supervised, we introduce a weak boxes generate branch and a weak boxes refine branch to produce pseudo ground truth label for unlabeled images with the guidance of annotated images. The weak boxes generate branch is embedded in the detection framework taking the proposals as input and outputting the initial weak boxes that coarsely locate the place of the head. Then, the weak boxes refine branch adjusts the weak boxes more accurate gradually by training a transferred sub-network with the established relation between proposals, weak boxes and labeled boxes. In the training process, we jointly train the two branches in an end-to-end manner, which can generate better pseudo bounding boxes with a small dataset online to avoid over-fitting and obtain a more precise head detector. The results on the public head detection benchmark Brainwash and SCUT-HEAD show the effectiveness of our method.