No Arabic abstract
Co-occurrent visual pattern makes aggregating contextual information a common paradigm to enhance the pixel representation for semantic image segmentation. The existing approaches focus on modeling the context from the perspective of the whole image, i.e., aggregating the image-level contextual information. Despite impressive, these methods weaken the significance of the pixel representations of the same category, i.e., the semantic-level contextual information. To address this, this paper proposes to augment the pixel representations by aggregating the image-level and semantic-level contextual information, respectively. First, an image-level context module is designed to capture the contextual information for each pixel in the whole image. Second, we aggregate the representations of the same category for each pixel where the category regions are learned under the supervision of the ground-truth segmentation. Third, we compute the similarities between each pixel representation and the image-level contextual information, the semantic-level contextual information, respectively. At last, a pixel representation is augmented by weighted aggregating both the image-level contextual information and the semantic-level contextual information with the similarities as the weights. Integrating the image-level and semantic-level context allows this paper to report state-of-the-art accuracy on four benchmarks, i.e., ADE20K, LIP, COCOStuff and Cityscapes.
Semantic image segmentation aims to obtain object labels with precise boundaries, which usually suffers from overfitting. Recently, various data augmentation strategies like regional dropout and mix strategies have been proposed to address the problem. These strategies have proved to be effective for guiding the model to attend on less discriminative parts. However, current strategies operate at the image level, and objects and the background are coupled. Thus, the boundaries are not well augmented due to the fixed semantic scenario. In this paper, we propose ObjectAug to perform object-level augmentation for semantic image segmentation. ObjectAug first decouples the image into individual objects and the background using the semantic labels. Next, each object is augmented individually with commonly used augmentation methods (e.g., scaling, shifting, and rotation). Then, the black area brought by object augmentation is further restored using image inpainting. Finally, the augmented objects and background are assembled as an augmented image. In this way, the boundaries can be fully explored in the various semantic scenarios. In addition, ObjectAug can support category-aware augmentation that gives various possibilities to objects in each category, and can be easily combined with existing image-level augmentation methods to further boost performance. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on both natural image and medical image datasets. Experiment results demonstrate that our ObjectAug can evidently improve segmentation performance.
Compared with expensive pixel-wise annotations, image-level labels make it possible to learn semantic segmentation in a weakly-supervised manner. Within this pipeline, the class activation map (CAM) is obtained and further processed to serve as a pseudo label to train the semantic segmentation model in a fully-supervised manner. In this paper, we argue that the lost structure information in CAM limits its application in downstream semantic segmentation, leading to deteriorated predictions. Furthermore, the inconsistent class activation scores inside the same object contradicts the common sense that each region of the same object should belong to the same semantic category. To produce sharp prediction with structure information, we introduce an auxiliary semantic boundary detection module, which penalizes the deteriorated predictions. Furthermore, we adopt smoothness loss to encourage prediction inside the object to be consistent. Experimental results on the PASCAL-VOC dataset illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Despite the great progress made by deep neural networks in the semantic segmentation task, traditional neural-networkbased methods typically suffer from a shortage of large amounts of pixel-level annotations. Recent progress in fewshot semantic segmentation tackles the issue by only a few pixel-level annotated examples. However, these few-shot approaches cannot easily be applied to multi-way or weak annotation settings. In this paper, we advance the few-shot segmentation paradigm towards a scenario where image-level annotations are available to help the training process of a few pixel-level annotations. Our key idea is to learn a better prototype representation of the class by fusing the knowledge from the image-level labeled data. Specifically, we propose a new framework, called PAIA, to learn the class prototype representation in a metric space by integrating image-level annotations. Furthermore, by considering the uncertainty of pseudo-masks, a distilled soft masked average pooling strategy is designed to handle distractions in image-level annotations. Extensive empirical results on two datasets show superior performance of PAIA.
Most existing point cloud instance and semantic segmentation methods rely heavily on strong supervision signals, which require point-level labels for every point in the scene. However, such strong supervision suffers from large annotation costs, arousing the need to study efficient annotating. In this paper, we discover that the locations of instances matter for 3D scene segmentation. By fully taking the advantages of locations, we design a weakly supervised point cloud segmentation algorithm that only requires clicking on one point per instance to indicate its location for annotation. With over-segmentation for pre-processing, we extend these location annotations into segments as seg-level labels. We further design a segment grouping network (SegGroup) to generate pseudo point-level labels under seg-level labels by hierarchically grouping the unlabeled segments into the relevant nearby labeled segments, so that existing point-level supervised segmentation models can directly consume these pseudo labels for training. Experimental results show that our seg-level supervised method (SegGroup) achieves comparable results with the fully annotated point-level supervised methods. Moreover, it also outperforms the recent weakly supervised methods given a fixed annotation budget.
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.