Abstract:Weakly supervised object localization aims to train target locators only by image-level labels instead of accurate location annotations for algorithm training. Some existing methods can only identify the most discriminative region of the target object and are incapable of covering the complete object, or can easily be misled by irrelevant background information, thereby leading to inaccurate object locations. Therefore, this study proposes a weakly supervised object localization algorithm based on attention mechanism and categorical hierarchy. The proposed method extracts a more complete object area by performing mean segmentation on the attention map of the convolutional neural network. In addition, the category hierarchy network is utilized to weaken the attention caused by background areas, which achieves more accurate object location results. Extensive experimental results on multiple public datasets show that the proposed method can yield better localization effects than other weakly supervised object localization methods under various evaluation metrics.