Complementary Cues from Audio Help Combat Noise in Weakly-Supervised Object Detection

We tackle the problem of learning object detectors in a noisy environment, which is one of the significant challenges for weakly-supervised learning. We use multimodal learning to help localize objects of interest, but unlike other methods, we treat audio as an auxiliary modality that assists to tackle noise in detection from visual regions. First, we use the audio-visual model to generate new "ground-truth" labels for the training set to remove noise between the visual features and noisy supervision. Second, we propose an "indirect path" between audio and class predictions, which combines the link between visual and audio regions, and the link between visual features and predictions. Third, we propose a sound-based "attention path" which uses the benefit of complementary audio cues to identify important visual regions. We use contrastive learning to perform region-based audio-visual instance discrimination, which serves as an intermediate task and benefits from the complementary cues from audio to boost object classification and detection performance. We show that our methods, which update noisy ground truth and provide indirect and attention paths, greatly boosting performance on the AudioSet and VGGSound datasets compared to single-modality predictions, even ones that use contrastive learning. Our method outperforms previous weakly-supervised detectors for the task of object detection by reaching the state-of-art on AudioSet, and our sound localization module performs better than several state-of-art methods on AudioSet and MUSIC.