Title
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Iterative Affinity Learning
Abstract
Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation is a challenging task as no pixel-wise label information is provided for training. Recent methods have exploited classification networks to localize objects by selecting regions with strong response. While such response map provides sparse information, however, there exist strong pairwise relations between pixels in natural images, which can be utilized to propagate the sparse map to a much denser one. In this paper, we propose an iterative algorithm to learn such pairwise relations, which consists of two branches, a unary segmentation network which learns the label probabilities for each pixel, and a pairwise affinity network which learns affinity matrix and refines the probability map generated from the unary network. The refined results by the pairwise network are then used as supervision to train the unary network, and the procedures are conducted iteratively to obtain better segmentation progressively. To learn reliable pixel affinity without accurate annotation, we also propose to mine confident regions. We show that iteratively training this framework is equivalent to optimizing an energy function with convergence to a local minimum. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1007/s11263-020-01293-3
International Journal of Computer Vision
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Weakly-supervised learning, Semantic segmentation, Affinity
Journal
128
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
6
0920-5691
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.48
25
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiang Wang1439.37
Sifei Liu222717.54
Huimin Ma319729.49
Yang Ming-Hsuan415303620.69