  Data-driven approaches for edge detection have proven effective and achieve
top results on modern benchmarks. However, all current data-driven edge
detectors require manual supervision for training in the form of hand-labeled
region segments or object boundaries. Specifically, human annotators mark
semantically meaningful edges which are subsequently used for training. Is this
form of strong, high-level supervision actually necessary to learn to
accurately detect edges? In this work we present a simple yet effective
approach for training edge detectors without human supervision. To this end we
utilize motion, and more specifically, the only input to our method is noisy
semi-dense matches between frames. We begin with only a rudimentary knowledge
of edges (in the form of image gradients), and alternate between improving
motion estimation and edge detection in turn. Using a large corpus of video
data, we show that edge detectors trained using our unsupervised scheme
approach the performance of the same methods trained with full supervision
(within 3-5%). Finally, we show that when using a deep network for the edge
detector, our approach provides a novel pre-training scheme for object
detection.
