Deep Active Learning for Computer Vision Tasks: Methodologies, Applications, and Challenges

Abstract

Active learning is a label-efficient machine learning method that actively selects the most valuable unlabeled samples to annotate. Active learning focuses on achieving the best possible performance while using as few, high-quality sample annotations as possible. Recently, active learning achieved promotion combined with deep learning-based methods, which are named deep active learning methods in this paper. Deep active learning plays a crucial role in computer vision tasks, especially in label-insensitive scenarios, such as hard-to-label tasks (medical images analysis) and time-consuming tasks (autonomous driving). However, deep active learning still has some challenges, such as unstable performance and dirty data, which are future research trends. Compared with other reviews on deep active learning, our work introduced the deep active learning from computer vision-related methodologies and corresponding applications. The expected audience of this vision-friendly survey are researchers who are working in computer vision but willing to utilize deep active learning methods to solve vision problems. Specifically, this review systematically focuses on the details of methods, applications, and challenges in vision tasks, and we also introduce the classic theories, strategies, and scenarios of active learning in brief.