No Arabic abstract
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) based on image-level labels has been greatly advanced by exploiting the outputs of Class Activation Map (CAM) to generate the pseudo labels for semantic segmentation. However, CAM merely discovers seeds from a small number of regions, which may be insufficient to serve as pseudo masks for semantic segmentation. In this paper, we formulate the expansion of object regions in CAM as an increase in information. From the perspective of information theory, we propose a novel Complementary Patch (CP) Representation and prove that the information of the sum of the CAMs by a pair of input images with complementary hidden (patched) parts, namely CP Pair, is greater than or equal to the information of the baseline CAM. Therefore, a CAM with more information related to object seeds can be obtained by narrowing down the gap between the sum of CAMs generated by the CP Pair and the original CAM. We propose a CP Network (CPN) implemented by a triplet network and three regularization functions. To further improve the quality of the CAMs, we propose a Pixel-Region Correlation Module (PRCM) to augment the contextual information by using object-region relations between the feature maps and the CAMs. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets show that our proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art in WSSS, validating the effectiveness of our CP Representation and CPN.
Acquiring sufficient ground-truth supervision to train deep visual models has been a bottleneck over the years due to the data-hungry nature of deep learning. This is exacerbated in some structured prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation, which requires pixel-level annotations. This work addresses weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), with the goal of bridging the gap between image-level annotations and pixel-level segmentation. We formulate WSSS as a novel group-wise learning task that explicitly models semantic dependencies in a group of images to estimate more reliable pseudo ground-truths, which can be used for training more accurate segmentation models. In particular, we devise a graph neural network (GNN) for group-wise semantic mining, wherein input images are represented as graph nodes, and the underlying relations between a pair of images are characterized by an efficient co-attention mechanism. Moreover, in order to prevent the model from paying excessive attention to common semantics only, we further propose a graph dropout layer, encouraging the model to learn more accurate and complete object responses. The whole network is end-to-end trainable by iterative message passing, which propagates interaction cues over the images to progressively improve the performance. We conduct experiments on the popular PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO benchmarks, and our model yields state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Lixy1997/Group-WSSS.
Pixel-wise clean annotation is necessary for fully-supervised semantic segmentation, which is laborious and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised 2D semantic segmentation model by incorporating sparse bounding box labels with available 3D information, which is much easier to obtain with advanced sensors. We manually labeled a subset of the 2D-3D Semantics(2D-3D-S) dataset with bounding boxes, and introduce our 2D-3D inference module to generate accurate pixel-wise segment proposal masks. Guided by 3D information, we first generate a point cloud of objects and calculate objectness probability score for each point. Then we project the point cloud with objectness probabilities back to 2D images followed by a refinement step to obtain segment proposals, which are treated as pseudo labels to train a semantic segmentation network. Our method works in a recursive manner to gradually refine the above-mentioned segment proposals. Extensive experimental results on the 2D-3D-S dataset show that the proposed method can generate accurate segment proposals when bounding box labels are available on only a small subset of training images. Performance comparison with recent state-of-the-art methods further illustrates the effectiveness of our method.
Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation aims to assign each pixel a semantic category under weak supervisions, such as image-level tags. Most of existing weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods do not use any feedback from segmentation output and can be considered as open-loop systems. They are prone to accumulated errors because of the static seeds and the sensitive structure information. In this paper, we propose a generic self-adaptation mechanism for existing weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods by introducing two feedback chains, thus constituting a closed-loop system. Specifically, the first chain iteratively produces dynamic seeds by incorporating cross-image structure information, whereas the second chain further expands seed regions by a customized random walk process to reconcile inner-image structure information characterized by superpixels. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 suggest that our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significantly less computational and memory burden.
Data augmentation is vital for deep learning neural networks. By providing massive training samples, it helps to improve the generalization ability of the model. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a challenging problem that has been deeply studied in recent years, conventional data augmentation approaches for WSSS usually employ geometrical transformations, random cropping and color jittering. However, merely increasing the same contextual semantic data does not bring much gain to the networks to distinguish the objects, e.g., the correct image-level classification of aeroplane may be not only due to the recognition of the object itself, but also its co-occurrence context like sky, which will cause the model to focus less on the object features. To this end, we present a Context Decoupling Augmentation (CDA) method, to change the inherent context in which the objects appear and thus drive the network to remove the dependence between object instances and contextual information. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset with several alternative network architectures demonstrate that CDA can boost various popular WSSS methods to the new state-of-the-art by a large margin.
Annotation burden has become one of the biggest barriers to semantic segmentation. Approaches based on click-level annotations have therefore attracted increasing attention due to their superior trade-off between supervision and annotation cost. In this paper, we propose seminar learning, a new learning paradigm for semantic segmentation with click-level supervision. The fundamental rationale of seminar learning is to leverage the knowledge from different networks to compensate for insufficient information provided in click-level annotations. Mimicking a seminar, our seminar learning involves a teacher-student and a student-student module, where a student can learn from both skillful teachers and other students. The teacher-student module uses a teacher network based on the exponential moving average to guide the training of the student network. In the student-student module, heterogeneous pseudo-labels are proposed to bridge the transfer of knowledge among students to enhance each others performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of seminar learning, which achieves the new state-of-the-art performance of 72.51% (mIOU), surpassing previous methods by a large margin of up to 16.88% on the Pascal VOC 2012 dataset.