  Is strong supervision necessary for learning a good visual representation? Do
we really need millions of semantically-labeled images to train a Convolutional
Neural Network (CNN)? In this paper, we present a simple yet surprisingly
powerful approach for unsupervised learning of CNN. Specifically, we use
hundreds of thousands of unlabeled videos from the web to learn visual
representations. Our key idea is that visual tracking provides the supervision.
That is, two patches connected by a track should have similar visual
representation in deep feature space since they probably belong to the same
object or object part. We design a Siamese-triplet network with a ranking loss
function to train this CNN representation. Without using a single image from
ImageNet, just using 100K unlabeled videos and the VOC 2012 dataset, we train
an ensemble of unsupervised networks that achieves 52% mAP (no bounding box
regression). This performance comes tantalizingly close to its
ImageNet-supervised counterpart, an ensemble which achieves a mAP of 54.4%. We
also show that our unsupervised network can perform competitively in other
tasks such as surface-normal estimation.
