Learning in data-scarce settings has recently gained significant attention in the research community. Semi-supervised object detection(SSOD) aims to improve detection performance by leveraging a large number of unlabeled images alongside a limited number of labeled images(a.k.a.,few-shot learning). In this paper, we present a comprehensive comparison of three state-of-the-art SSOD approaches, including MixPL, Semi-DETR and Consistent-Teacher, with the goal of understanding how performance varies with the number of labeled images. We conduct experiments using the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, two popular object detection benchmarks which allow for standardized evaluation. In addition, we evaluate the SSOD approaches on a custom Beetle dataset which enables us to gain insights into their performance on specialized datasets with a smaller number of object categories. Our findings highlight the trade-offs between accuracy, model size, and latency, providing insights into which methods are best suited for low-data regimes.
@article{arxiv.2601.13380,
title = {Practical Insights into Semi-Supervised Object Detection Approaches},
author = {Chaoxin Wang and Bharaneeshwar Balasubramaniyam and Anurag Sangem and Nicolais Guevara and Doina Caragea},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.13380},
year = {2026}
}