  Most existing weakly supervised localization (WSL) approaches learn detectors
by finding positive bounding boxes based on features learned with image-level
supervision. However, those features do not contain spatial location related
information and usually provide poor-quality positive samples for training a
detector. To overcome this issue, we propose a deep self-taught learning
approach, which makes the detector learn the object-level features reliable for
acquiring tight positive samples and afterwards re-train itself based on them.
Consequently, the detector progressively improves its detection ability and
localizes more informative positive samples. To implement such self-taught
learning, we propose a seed sample acquisition method via image-to-object
transferring and dense subgraph discovery to find reliable positive samples for
initializing the detector. An online supportive sample harvesting scheme is
further proposed to dynamically select the most confident tight positive
samples and train the detector in a mutual boosting way. To prevent the
detector from being trapped in poor optima due to overfitting, we propose a new
relative improvement of predicted CNN scores for guiding the self-taught
learning process. Extensive experiments on PASCAL 2007 and 2012 show that our
approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts, strongly validating its
effectiveness.
