A Simple Baseline for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation With Strong Data Augmentation

Jianlong Yuan, Yifan Liu, Chunhua Shen, Zhibin Wang, Hao Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 8229-8238

Recently, significant progress has been made on semantic segmentation. However, the success of supervised semantic segmentation typically relies on a large amount of labeled data, which is time-consuming and costly to obtain. Inspired by the success of semi-supervised learning methods in image classification, here we propose a simple yet effective semi-supervised learning framework for semantic segmentation. We demonstrate that the devil is in the details: a set of simple design and training techniques can collectively improve the performance of semi-supervised semantic segmentation significantly. Previous works fail to employ strong augmentation in pseudo label learning efficiently, as the large distribution change caused by strong augmentation harms the batch normalization statistics. We design a new batch normalization, namely distribution-specific batch normalization (DSBN) to address this problem and demonstrate the importance of strong augmentation for semantic segmentation. Moreover, we design a self-correction loss which is effective in noise resistance. We conduct a series of ablation studies to show the effectiveness of each component. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the semi-supervised settings on the Cityscapes and Pascal VOC datasets.