Combating noisy labels in object detection datasets

The quality of training datasets for deep neural networks is a key factor contributing to the accuracy of resulting models. This is even more important in difficult tasks such as object detection. Dealing with errors in these datasets was in the past limited to accepting that some fraction of examples is incorrect or predicting their confidence and assigning appropriate weights during training. In this work, we propose a different approach. For the first time, we extended the confident learning algorithm to the object detection task. By focusing on finding incorrect labels in the original training datasets, we can eliminate erroneous examples in their root. Suspicious bounding boxes can be re-annotated in order to improve the quality of the dataset itself, thus leading to better models without complicating their already complex architectures. We can effectively point out 99\% of artificially disturbed bounding boxes with FPR below 0.3. We see this method as a promising path to correcting well-known object detection datasets.