With availability of huge amounts of labeled data, deep learning has achieved unprecedented success in various object detection tasks. However, large-scale annotations for medical images are extremely challenging to be acquired due to the high demand of labour and expertise. To address this difficult issue, in this paper we propose a novel semi-supervised deep metric learning method to effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data with application to cervical cancer cell detection. Different from previous methods, our model learns an embedding metric space and conducts dual alignment of semantic features on both the proposal and prototype levels. First, on the proposal level, we generate pseudo labels for the unlabeled data to align the proposal features with learnable class proxies derived from the labeled data. Furthermore, we align the prototypes generated from each mini-batch of labeled and unlabeled data to alleviate the influence of possibly noisy pseudo labels. Moreover, we adopt a memory bank to store the labeled prototypes and hence significantly enrich the metric learning information from larger batches. To comprehensively validate the method, we construct a large-scale dataset for semi-supervised cervical cancer cell detection for the first time, consisting of 240,860 cervical cell images in total. Extensive experiments show our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches consistently, demonstrating efficacy of deep semi-supervised metric learning with dual alignment on improving cervical cancer cell detection performance.
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