Cap2Det: Learning to Amplify Weak Caption Supervision for Object Detection

Learning to localize and name object instances is a fundamental problem in vision, but state-of-the-art approaches rely on expensive bounding box supervision. While weakly supervised detection (WSOD) methods relax the need for boxes to that of image-level annotations, even cheaper supervision is naturally available in the form of unstructured textual descriptions that users may freely provide when uploading image content. However, straightforward approaches to using such data for WSOD wastefully discard captions that do not exactly match object names. Instead, we show how to squeeze the most information out of these captions by training a text-only classifier that generalizes beyond dataset boundaries. Our discovery provides an opportunity for learning detection models from noisy but more abundant and freely-available caption data. We also validate our model on three classic object detection benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art WSOD performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/yekeren/Cap2Det.