Abstract
Training object class detectors typically requires a large
set of images with objects annotated by bounding boxes.
However, manually drawing bounding boxes is very time
consuming. In this paper we greatly reduce annotation
time by proposing center-click annotations: we ask annotators to click on the center of an imaginary bounding box
which tightly encloses the object instance. We then incorporate these clicks into existing Multiple Instance Learning techniques for weakly supervised object localization, to
jointly localize object bounding boxes over all training images. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 and
MS COCO show that: (1) our scheme delivers high-quality
detectors, performing substantially better than those produced by weakly supervised techniques, with a modest extra annotation effort; (2) these detectors in fact perform in a
range close to those trained from manually drawn bounding
boxes; (3) as the center-click task is very fast, our scheme
reduces total annotation time by 9× to 18×