In this paper, we study the semi-supervised semantic segmentation problem via exploring both labeled data and extra unlabeled data. We propose a novel consistency regularization approach, called cross pseudo supervision (CPS). Our approach imposes the consistency on two segmentation networks perturbed with different initialization for the same input image. The pseudo one-hot label map, output from one perturbed segmentation network, is used to supervise the other segmentation network with the standard cross-entropy loss, and vice versa. The CPS consistency has two roles: encourage high similarity between the predictions of two perturbed networks for the same input image, and expand training data by using the unlabeled data with pseudo labels. Experiment results show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art semi-supervised segmentation performance on Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012. Code is available at //git.io/CPS.
While self-training has advanced semi-supervised semantic segmentation, it severely suffers from the long-tailed class distribution on real-world semantic segmentation datasets that make the pseudo-labeled data bias toward majority classes. In this paper, we present a simple and yet effective Distribution Alignment and Random Sampling (DARS) method to produce unbiased pseudo labels that match the true class distribution estimated from the labeled data. Besides, we also contribute a progressive data augmentation and labeling strategy to facilitate model training with pseudo-labeled data. Experiments on both Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Albeit simple, our method performs favorably in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches. Code will be available at //github.com/CVMI-Lab/DARS.
Semantic segmentation is a challenging task in the absence of densely labelled data. Only relying on class activation maps (CAM) with image-level labels provides deficient segmentation supervision. Prior works thus consider pre-trained models to produce coarse saliency maps to guide the generation of pseudo segmentation labels. However, the commonly used off-line heuristic generation process cannot fully exploit the benefits of these coarse saliency maps. Motivated by the significant inter-task correlation, we propose a novel weakly supervised multi-task framework termed as AuxSegNet, to leverage saliency detection and multi-label image classification as auxiliary tasks to improve the primary task of semantic segmentation using only image-level ground-truth labels. Inspired by their similar structured semantics, we also propose to learn a cross-task global pixel-level affinity map from the saliency and segmentation representations. The learned cross-task affinity can be used to refine saliency predictions and propagate CAM maps to provide improved pseudo labels for both tasks. The mutual boost between pseudo label updating and cross-task affinity learning enables iterative improvements on segmentation performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed auxiliary learning network structure and the cross-task affinity learning method. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art weakly supervised segmentation performance on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO benchmarks.
Semantic segmentation on 3D point clouds is an important task for 3D scene understanding. While dense labeling on 3D data is expensive and time-consuming, only a few works address weakly supervised semantic point cloud segmentation methods to relieve the labeling cost by learning from simpler and cheaper labels. Meanwhile, there are still huge performance gaps between existing weakly supervised methods and state-of-the-art fully supervised methods. In this paper, we train a semantic point cloud segmentation network with only a small portion of points being labeled. We argue that we can better utilize the limited supervision information as we densely propagate the supervision signal from the labeled points to other points within and across the input samples. Specifically, we propose a cross-sample feature reallocating module to transfer similar features and therefore re-route the gradients across two samples with common classes and an intra-sample feature redistribution module to propagate supervision signals on unlabeled points across and within point cloud samples. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets S3DIS and ScanNet. Our weakly supervised method with only 10\% and 1\% of labels can produce compatible results with the fully supervised counterpart.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for semantic segmentation has gained immense popularity since it can transfer knowledge from simulation to real (Sim2Real) by largely cutting out the laborious per pixel labeling efforts at real. In this work, we present a new video extension of this task, namely Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Video Semantic Segmentation. As it became easy to obtain large-scale video labels through simulation, we believe attempting to maximize Sim2Real knowledge transferability is one of the promising directions for resolving the fundamental data-hungry issue in the video. To tackle this new problem, we present a novel two-phase adaptation scheme. In the first step, we exhaustively distill source domain knowledge using supervised loss functions. Simultaneously, video adversarial training (VAT) is employed to align the features from source to target utilizing video context. In the second step, we apply video self-training (VST), focusing only on the target data. To construct robust pseudo labels, we exploit the temporal information in the video, which has been rarely explored in the previous image-based self-training approaches. We set strong baseline scores on 'VIPER to CityscapeVPS' adaptation scenario. We show that our proposals significantly outperform previous image-based UDA methods both on image-level (mIoU) and video-level (VPQ) evaluation metrics.
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: //github.com/Lixy1997/Group-WSSS.
In this paper, we address the problem of semantic segmentation and focus on the context aggregation strategy for robust segmentation. Our motivation is that the label of a pixel is the category of the object that the pixel belongs to. We present a simple yet effective approach, object-contextual representations, characterizing a pixel by exploiting the representation of the corresponding object class. First, we construct object regions based on a feature map supervised by the ground-truth segmentation, and then compute the object region representations. Second, we compute the representation similarity between each pixel and each object region, and augment the representation of each pixel with an object contextual representation, which is a weighted aggregation of all the object region representations according to their similarities with the pixel. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance on six challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks: Cityscapes, ADE20K, LIP, PASCAL VOC 2012, PASCAL-Context and COCO-Stuff. Notably, we achieved the \nth{2} place on the Cityscapes leader-board with a single model.
In this work, we study the problem of training deep networks for semantic image segmentation using only a fraction of annotated images, which may significantly reduce human annotation efforts. Particularly, we propose a strategy that exploits the unpaired image style transfer capabilities of CycleGAN in semi-supervised segmentation. Unlike recent works using adversarial learning for semi-supervised segmentation, we enforce cycle consistency to learn a bidirectional mapping between unpaired images and segmentation masks. This adds an unsupervised regularization effect that boosts the segmentation performance when annotated data is limited. Experiments on three different public segmentation benchmarks (PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes and ACDC) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed model achieves 2-4% of improvement with respect to the baseline and outperforms recent approaches for this task, particularly in low labeled data regime.
Existing Earth Vision datasets are either suitable for semantic segmentation or object detection. In this work, we introduce the first benchmark dataset for instance segmentation in aerial imagery that combines instance-level object detection and pixel-level segmentation tasks. In comparison to instance segmentation in natural scenes, aerial images present unique challenges e.g., a huge number of instances per image, large object-scale variations and abundant tiny objects. Our large-scale and densely annotated Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images Dataset (iSAID) comes with 655,451 object instances for 15 categories across 2,806 high-resolution images. Such precise per-pixel annotations for each instance ensure accurate localization that is essential for detailed scene analysis. Compared to existing small-scale aerial image based instance segmentation datasets, iSAID contains 15$\times$ the number of object categories and 5$\times$ the number of instances. We benchmark our dataset using two popular instance segmentation approaches for natural images, namely Mask R-CNN and PANet. In our experiments we show that direct application of off-the-shelf Mask R-CNN and PANet on aerial images provide suboptimal instance segmentation results, thus requiring specialized solutions from the research community. The dataset is publicly available at: //captain-whu.github.io/iSAID/index.html
This work tackles the problem of semi-supervised learning of image classifiers. Our main insight is that the field of semi-supervised learning can benefit from the quickly advancing field of self-supervised visual representation learning. Unifying these two approaches, we propose the framework of self-supervised semi-supervised learning ($S^4L$) and use it to derive two novel semi-supervised image classification methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in comparison to both carefully tuned baselines, and existing semi-supervised learning methods. We then show that $S^4L$ and existing semi-supervised methods can be jointly trained, yielding a new state-of-the-art result on semi-supervised ILSVRC-2012 with 10% of labels.
The main obstacle to weakly supervised semantic image segmentation is the difficulty of obtaining pixel-level information from coarse image-level annotations. Most methods based on image-level annotations use localization maps obtained from the classifier, but these only focus on the small discriminative parts of objects and do not capture precise boundaries. FickleNet explores diverse combinations of locations on feature maps created by generic deep neural networks. It selects hidden units randomly and then uses them to obtain activation scores for image classification. FickleNet implicitly learns the coherence of each location in the feature maps, resulting in a localization map which identifies both discriminative and other parts of objects. The ensemble effects are obtained from a single network by selecting random hidden unit pairs, which means that a variety of localization maps are generated from a single image. Our approach does not require any additional training steps and only adds a simple layer to a standard convolutional neural network; nevertheless it outperforms recent comparable techniques on the Pascal VOC 2012 benchmark in both weakly and semi-supervised settings.