Apprenticeship Learning: Transfer of Knowledge via Dataset Augmentation

In visual category recognition there is often a trade-off between fast and powerful classifiers. Complex models often have superior performance to simple ones but are computationally too expensive for many applications. At the same time the performance of simple classifiers is not necessarily limited only by their flexibility but also by the amount of labelled data available for training. We propose a semi-supervised wrapper algorithm named apprenticeship learning, which leverages the strength of slow but powerful classification methods to improve the performance of simpler methods. The powerful classifier parses a large pool of unlabelled data, labelling positive examples to extend the dataset of the simple classifier. We demonstrate apprenticeship learning and its effectiveness by performing experiments on the VOC2007 dataset one experiment improving detection performance on VOC2007, and one domain adaptation experiment, where the VOC2007 classifier is adapted to a new dataset, collected using a GoPro camera.