Supervised learning needs a huge amount of labeled data, which can be a big bottleneck under the situation where there is a privacy concern or labeling cost is high. To overcome this problem, we propose a new weakly-supervised learning setting where only similar (S) data pairs (two examples belong to the same class) and unlabeled (U) data points are needed instead of fully labeled data, which is called SU classification. We show that an unbiased estimator of the classification risk can be obtained only from SU data, and the estimation error of its empirical risk minimizer achieves the optimal parametric convergence rate. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments.
Surgical tool localization is an essential task for the automatic analysis of endoscopic videos. In the literature, existing methods for tool localization, tracking and segmentation require training data that is fully annotated, thereby limiting the size of the datasets that can be used and the generalization of the approaches. In this work, we propose to circumvent the lack of annotated data with weak supervision. We propose a deep architecture, trained solely on image level annotations, that can be used for both tool presence detection and localization in surgical videos. Our architecture relies on a fully convolutional neural network, trained end-to-end, enabling us to localize surgical tools without explicit spatial annotations. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on a large public dataset, Cholec80, which is fully annotated with binary tool presence information and of which 5 videos have been fully annotated with bounding boxes and tool centers for the evaluation.
Many approaches to semantic image hashing have been formulated as supervised learning problems that utilize images and label information to learn the binary hash codes. However, large-scale labeled image data is expensive to obtain, thus imposing a restriction on the usage of such algorithms. On the other hand, unlabelled image data is abundant due to the existence of many Web image repositories. Such Web images may often come with images tags that contain useful information, although raw tags, in general, do not readily lead to semantic labels. Motivated by this scenario, we formulate the problem of semantic image hashing as a weakly-supervised learning problem. We utilize the information contained in the user-generated tags associated with the images to learn the hash codes. More specifically, we extract the word2vec semantic embeddings of the tags and use the information contained in them for constraining the learning. Accordingly, we name our model Weakly Supervised Deep Hashing using Tag Embeddings (WDHT). WDHT is tested for the task of semantic image retrieval and is compared against several state-of-art models. Results show that our approach sets a new state-of-art in the area of weekly supervised image hashing.