MUS-CDB: Mixed Uncertainty Sampling with Class Distribution Balancing for Active Annotation in Aerial Object Detection

Recent aerial object detection models rely on a large amount of labeled training data, which requires unaffordable manual labeling costs in large aerial scenes with dense objects. Active learning is effective in reducing the data labeling cost by selectively querying the informative and representative unlabelled samples. However, existing active learning methods are mainly with class-balanced setting and image-based querying for generic object detection tasks, which are less applicable to aerial object detection scenario due to the long-tailed class distribution and dense small objects in aerial scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning method for cost-effective aerial object detection. Specifically, both object-level and image-level informativeness are considered in the object selection to refrain from redundant and myopic querying. Besides, an easy-to-use class-balancing criterion is incorporated to favor the minority objects to alleviate the long-tailed class distribution problem in model training. To fully utilize the queried information, we further devise a training loss to mine the latent knowledge in the undiscovered image regions. Extensive experiments are conducted on the DOTA-v1.0 and DOTA-v2.0 benchmarks to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that it can save more than 75% of the labeling cost to reach the same performance compared to the baselines and state-of-the-art active object detection methods. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/ZJW700/MUS-CDB}{\textit{https://github.com/ZJW700/MUS-CDB}}.