DTG-SSOD: Dense Teacher Guidance for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

The Mean-Teacher (MT) scheme is widely adopted in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). In MT, the sparse pseudo labels, offered by the final predictions of the teacher (e.g., after Non Maximum Suppression (NMS) post-processing), are adopted for the dense supervision for the student via hand-crafted label assignment. However, the "sparse-to-dense" paradigm complicates the pipeline of SSOD, and simultaneously neglects the powerful direct, dense teacher supervision. In this paper, we attempt to directly leverage the dense guidance of teacher to supervise student training, i.e., the "dense-to-dense" paradigm. Specifically, we propose the Inverse NMS Clustering (INC) and Rank Matching (RM) to instantiate the dense supervision, without the widely used, conventional sparse pseudo labels.