Pixel is All You Need: Adversarial Spatio-Temporal Ensemble Active Learning for Salient Object Detection

Although weakly-supervised techniques can reduce the labeling effort, it is unclear whether a saliency model trained with weakly-supervised data (e.g., point annotation) can achieve the equivalent performance of its fully-supervised version. This paper attempts to answer this unexplored question by proving a hypothesis: there is a point-labeled dataset where saliency models trained on it can achieve equivalent performance when trained on the densely annotated dataset. To prove this conjecture, we proposed a novel yet effective adversarial spatio-temporal ensemble active learning. Our contributions are four- fold: 1) Our proposed adversarial attack triggering uncertainty can conquer the overconfidence of existing active learning methods and accurately locate these uncertain pixels. 2) Our proposed spatio-temporal ensemble strategy not only achieves outstanding performance but significantly reduces the model's computational cost. 3) Our proposed relationship-aware diversity sampling can conquer oversampling while boosting model performance. 4) We provide theoretical proof for the existence of such a point-labeled dataset. Experimental results show that our approach can find such a point-labeled dataset, where a saliency model trained on it obtained 98%-99% performance of its fully-supervised version with only ten annotated points per image. The code is available at https://github.com/wuzhenyubuaa/ASTE-AL.