Treating Pseudo-labels Generation as Image Matting for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Changwei Wang, Rongtao Xu, Shibiao Xu, Weiliang Meng, Xiaopeng Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 755-765

Generating accurate pseudo-labels under the supervision of image categories is a crucial step in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS). In this work, we propose a Mat-Label pipeline that provides a fresh way to treat WSSS pseudo-labels generation as an image matting task. By taking a trimap as input which specifies the foreground, background and unknown regions, the image matting task outputs an object mask with fine edges. The intuition behind our Mat-Label is that generating trimap is much easier than generating pseudo-labels directly under weakly supervised setting. Although current CAM-based methods are off-the-shelf solutions for generating a trimap, they suffer from cross-category and foreground-background pixel prediction confusion. To solve this problem, we develop a Double Decoupled Class Activation Map (D2CAM) for Mat-Label to generate a high-quality trimap. By drawing on the idea of metric learning, we explicitly model class activation map with category decoupling and foreground-background decoupling. We also design two simple yet effective refinement constraints for D2CAM to stabilize optimization and eliminate non-exclusive activation. Extensive experiments validate that our Mat-Label achieves substantial and consistent performance gains compared to current state-of-the-art WSSS approaches. Our code is available at supplementary material.