While there are novel point cloud semantic segmentation schemes that continuously surpass state-of-the-art results, the success of learning an effective model usually rely on the availability of abundant labeled data. However, data annotation is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task, particularly for large-scale airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds involving multiple classes in urban areas. Thus, how to attain promising results while largely reducing labeling works become an essential issue. In this study, we propose a deep-learning based weakly supervised framework for semantic segmentation of ALS point clouds, exploiting potential information from unlabeled data subject to incomplete and sparse labels. Entropy regularization is introduced to penalize the class overlap in predictive probability. Additionally, a consistency constraint by minimizing difference between current and ensemble predictions is designed to improve the robustness of predictions. Finally, we propose an online soft pseudo-labeling strategy to create extra supervisory sources in an efficient and nonpaprametric way. Extensive experimental analysis using three benchmark datasets demonstrates that in case of sparse point annotations, our proposed method significantly boosts the classification performance without compromising the computational efficiency. It outperforms current weakly supervised methods and achieves a comparable result against full supervision competitors. For the ISPRS 3D Labeling Vaihingen data, by using only 0.1% of labels, our method achieves an overall accuracy of 83.0% and an average F1 score of 70.0%, which have increased by 6.9% and 12.8% respectively, compared to model trained by sparse label information only.
Although there is significant progress in supervised semantic segmentation, it remains challenging to deploy the segmentation models to unseen domains due to domain biases. Domain adaptation can help in this regard by transferring knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Previous methods typically attempt to perform the adaptation on global features, however, the local semantic affiliations accounting for each pixel in the feature space are often ignored, resulting in less discriminability. To solve this issue, we propose a novel semantic prototype-based contrastive learning framework for fine-grained class alignment. Specifically, the semantic prototypes provide supervisory signals for per-pixel discriminative representation learning and each pixel of source and target domains in the feature space is required to reflect the content of the corresponding semantic prototype. In this way, our framework is able to explicitly make intra-class pixel representations closer and inter-class pixel representations further apart to improve the robustness of the segmentation model as well as alleviate the domain shift problem. Our method is easy to implement and attains superior results compared to state-of-the-art approaches, as is demonstrated with a number of experiments. The code is publicly available at [this https URL](//github.com/BinhuiXie/SPCL).
Due to the limited and even imbalanced data, semi-supervised semantic segmentation tends to have poor performance on some certain categories, e.g., tailed categories in Cityscapes dataset which exhibits a long-tailed label distribution. Existing approaches almost all neglect this problem, and treat categories equally. Some popular approaches such as consistency regularization or pseudo-labeling may even harm the learning of under-performing categories, that the predictions or pseudo labels of these categories could be too inaccurate to guide the learning on the unlabeled data. In this paper, we look into this problem, and propose a novel framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation, named adaptive equalization learning (AEL). AEL adaptively balances the training of well and badly performed categories, with a confidence bank to dynamically track category-wise performance during training. The confidence bank is leveraged as an indicator to tilt training towards under-performing categories, instantiated in three strategies: 1) adaptive Copy-Paste and CutMix data augmentation approaches which give more chance for under-performing categories to be copied or cut; 2) an adaptive data sampling approach to encourage pixels from under-performing category to be sampled; 3) a simple yet effective re-weighting method to alleviate the training noise raised by pseudo-labeling. Experimentally, AEL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the Cityscapes and Pascal VOC benchmarks under various data partition protocols. Code is available at //github.com/hzhupku/SemiSeg-AEL
In this paper, we tackle the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation, which aims to segment the unlabeled real data using labeled synthetic data. The main problem of UDA for semantic segmentation relies on reducing the domain gap between the real image and synthetic image. To solve this problem, we focused on separating information in an image into content and style. Here, only the content has cues for semantic segmentation, and the style makes the domain gap. Thus, precise separation of content and style in an image leads to effect as supervision of real data even when learning with synthetic data. To make the best of this effect, we propose a zero-style loss. Even though we perfectly extract content for semantic segmentation in the real domain, another main challenge, the class imbalance problem, still exists in UDA for semantic segmentation. We address this problem by transferring the contents of tail classes from synthetic to real domain. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semantic segmentation on the major two UDA settings.
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.
We propose a method for the weakly supervised detection of objects in paintings. At training time, only image-level annotations are needed. This, combined with the efficiency of our multiple-instance learning method, enables one to learn new classes on-the-fly from globally annotated databases, avoiding the tedious task of manually marking objects. We show on several databases that dropping the instance-level annotations only yields mild performance losses. We also introduce a new database, IconArt, on which we perform detection experiments on classes that could not be learned on photographs, such as Jesus Child or Saint Sebastian. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first experiments dealing with the automatic (and in our case weakly supervised) detection of iconographic elements in paintings. We believe that such a method is of great benefit for helping art historians to explore large digital databases.
Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation under image tags supervision is a challenging task as it directly associates high-level semantic to low-level appearance. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose an iterative bottom-up and top-down framework which alternatively expands object regions and optimizes segmentation network. We start from initial localization produced by classification networks. While classification networks are only responsive to small and coarse discriminative object regions, we argue that, these regions contain significant common features about objects. So in the bottom-up step, we mine common object features from the initial localization and expand object regions with the mined features. To supplement non-discriminative regions, saliency maps are then considered under Bayesian framework to refine the object regions. Then in the top-down step, the refined object regions are used as supervision to train the segmentation network and to predict object masks. These object masks provide more accurate localization and contain more regions of object. Further, we take these object masks as initial localization and mine common object features from them. These processes are conducted iteratively to progressively produce fine object masks and optimize segmentation networks. Experimental results on Pascal VOC 2012 dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
We propose a novel locally adaptive learning estimator for enhancing the inter- and intra- discriminative capabilities of Deep Neural Networks, which can be used as improved loss layer for semantic image segmentation tasks. Most loss layers compute pixel-wise cost between feature maps and ground truths, ignoring spatial layouts and interactions between neighboring pixels with same object category, and thus networks cannot be effectively sensitive to intra-class connections. Stride by stride, our method firstly conducts adaptive pooling filter operating over predicted feature maps, aiming to merge predicted distributions over a small group of neighboring pixels with same category, and then it computes cost between the merged distribution vector and their category label. Such design can make groups of neighboring predictions from same category involved into estimations on predicting correctness with respect to their category, and hence train networks to be more sensitive to regional connections between adjacent pixels based on their categories. In the experiments on Pascal VOC 2012 segmentation datasets, the consistently improved results show that our proposed approach achieves better segmentation masks against previous counterparts.
Deep convolutional networks for semantic image segmentation typically require large-scale labeled data, e.g. ImageNet and MS COCO, for network pre-training. To reduce annotation efforts, self-supervised semantic segmentation is recently proposed to pre-train a network without any human-provided labels. The key of this new form of learning is to design a proxy task (e.g. image colorization), from which a discriminative loss can be formulated on unlabeled data. Many proxy tasks, however, lack the critical supervision signals that could induce discriminative representation for the target image segmentation task. Thus self-supervision's performance is still far from that of supervised pre-training. In this study, we overcome this limitation by incorporating a "mix-and-match" (M&M) tuning stage in the self-supervision pipeline. The proposed approach is readily pluggable to many self-supervision methods and does not use more annotated samples than the original process. Yet, it is capable of boosting the performance of target image segmentation task to surpass fully-supervised pre-trained counterpart. The improvement is made possible by better harnessing the limited pixel-wise annotations in the target dataset. Specifically, we first introduce the "mix" stage, which sparsely samples and mixes patches from the target set to reflect rich and diverse local patch statistics of target images. A "match" stage then forms a class-wise connected graph, which can be used to derive a strong triplet-based discriminative loss for fine-tuning the network. Our paradigm follows the standard practice in existing self-supervised studies and no extra data or label is required. With the proposed M&M approach, for the first time, a self-supervision method can achieve comparable or even better performance compared to its ImageNet pre-trained counterpart on both PASCAL VOC2012 dataset and CityScapes dataset.
Precise 3D segmentation of infant brain tissues is an essential step towards comprehensive volumetric studies and quantitative analysis of early brain developement. However, computing such segmentations is very challenging, especially for 6-month infant brain, due to the poor image quality, among other difficulties inherent to infant brain MRI, e.g., the isointense contrast between white and gray matter and the severe partial volume effect due to small brain sizes. This study investigates the problem with an ensemble of semi-dense fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which employs T1-weighted and T2-weighted MR images as input. We demonstrate that the ensemble agreement is highly correlated with the segmentation errors. Therefore, our method provides measures that can guide local user corrections. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first ensemble of 3D CNNs for suggesting annotations within images. Furthermore, inspired by the very recent success of dense networks, we propose a novel architecture, SemiDenseNet, which connects all convolutional layers directly to the end of the network. Our architecture allows the efficient propagation of gradients during training, while limiting the number of parameters, requiring one order of magnitude less parameters than popular medical image segmentation networks such as 3D U-Net. Another contribution of our work is the study of the impact that early or late fusions of multiple image modalities might have on the performances of deep architectures. We report evaluations of our method on the public data of the MICCAI iSEG-2017 Challenge on 6-month infant brain MRI segmentation, and show very competitive results among 21 teams, ranking first or second in most metrics.