Abstract: Appearance-based object recognition systems rely on training from imagery, which allows the recognition of objects without requiring a 3D geometric model. It has been little explored whether such systems can be trained from imagery that is unlabeled, and whether they can be trained from imagery that is not trivially segmentable.

In this paper we present a method for minimally supervised training of a previously developed recognition system from unlabeled and unsegmented imagery. We show that the system can successfully extend an object representation extracted from one black background image to contain object features extracted from unlabeled cluttered images and can use the extended representation to improve recognition performance on a test set.