MixTeacher: Mining Promising Labels With Mixed Scale Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Scale variation across object instances is one of the key challenges in object detection. Although modern detection models have achieved remarkable progress in dealing with the scale variation, it still brings trouble in the semi-supervised case. Most existing semi-supervised object detection methods rely on strict conditions to filter out high-quality pseudo labels from the network predictions. However, we observe that objects with extreme scale tend to have low confidence, which makes the positive supervision missing for these objects. In this paper, we delve into the scale variation problem, and propose a novel framework by introducing a mixed scale teacher to improve the pseudo labels generation and scale invariant learning. In addition, benefiting from the better predictions from mixed scale features, we propose to mine pseudo labels with the score promotion of predictions across scales. Extensive experiments on MS COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks under various semi-supervised settings demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. The code and models will be made publicly available.