Weakly-Supervised Dual Clustering for Image Semantic Segmentation

Yang Liu, Jing Liu, Zechao Li, Jinhui Tang, Hanqing Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 2075-2082

In this paper, we propose a novel Weakly-Supervised Dual Clustering (WSDC) approach for image semantic segmentation with image-level labels, i.e., collaboratively performing image segmentation and tag alignment with those regions. The proposed approach is motivated from the observation that superpixels belonging to an object class usually exist across multiple images and hence can be gathered via the idea of clustering. In WSDC, spectral clustering is adopted to cluster the superpixels obtained from a set of over-segmented images. At the same time, a linear transformation between features and labels as a kind of discriminative clustering is learned to select the discriminative features among different classes. The both clustering outputs should be consistent as much as possible. Besides, weakly-supervised constraints from image-level labels are imposed to restrict the labeling of superpixels. Finally, the non-convex and non-smooth objective function are efficiently optimized using an iterative CCCP procedure. Extensive experiments conducted on MSRC and LabelMe datasets demonstrate the encouraging performance of our method in comparison with some state-of-the-arts.