Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Unreliable Pseudo-Labels

Yuchao Wang, Haochen Wang, Yujun Shen, Jingjing Fei, Wei Li, Guoqiang Jin, Liwei Wu, Rui Zhao, Xinyi Le; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 4248-4257

The crux of semi-supervised semantic segmentation is to assign pseudo-labels to the pixels of unlabeled images. A common practice is to select the highly confident predictions as the pseudo ground-truth, but it leads to a problem that most pixels may be left unused due to their unreliability. We argue that every pixel matters to the model training. Intuitively, an unreliable prediction may get confused among the top classes (i.e., those with the highest probabilities), however, it should be confident about the pixel not belonging to the remaining classes. Hence, such a pixel can be convincingly treated as a negative sample to those most unlikely categories. Based on this insight, we develop an effective pipeline to make sufficient use of unlabeled data. We first separate reliable and unreliable pixels via the predicted entropy map, then push each unreliable pixel to a category-wise queue that consists of negative samples, and finally train the model with all candidate pixels. Considering the training evolution, where the prediction becomes more and more accurate, we adaptively adjust the threshold for the reliable-unreliable partition. Experimental results on various benchmarks and training settings demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art alternatives.