CREAM: Weakly Supervised Object Localization via Class RE-Activation Mapping

Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects with image-level supervision. Existing works mainly rely on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) derived from a classification model. However, CAM-based methods usually focus on the most discriminative parts of an object (i.e., incomplete localization problem). In this paper, we empirically prove that this problem is associated with the mixup of the activation values between less discriminative foreground regions and the background. To address it, we propose Class RE-Activation Mapping (CREAM), a novel clustering-based approach to boost the activation values of the integral object regions. To this end, we introduce class-specific foreground and background context embeddings as cluster centroids. A CAM-guided momentum preservation strategy is developed to learn the context embeddings during training. At the inference stage, the re-activation mapping is formulated as a parameter estimation problem under Gaussian Mixture Model, which can be solved by deriving an unsupervised Expectation-Maximization based soft-clustering algorithm. By simply integrating CREAM into various WSOL approaches, our method significantly improves their performance. CREAM achieves the state-of-the-art performance on CUB, ILSVRC and OpenImages benchmark datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/Jazzcharles/CREAM.