Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Learning Label Uncertainty

Robby Neven, Davy Neven, Bert De Brabandere, Marc Proesmans, Toon Goedemé; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2021, pp. 1678-1686

Since the rise of deep learning, many computer vision tasks have seen significant advancements. However, the downside of deep learning is that it is very data-hungry. Especially for segmentation problems, training a deep neural net requires dense supervision in the form of pixel-perfect image labels, which are very costly. In this paper, we present a new loss function to train a segmentation network with only a small subset of pixel-perfect labels, but take the advantage of weakly-annotated training samples in the form of cheap bounding-box labels. Unlike recent works which make use of box-to-mask proposal generators, our loss trains the network to learn a label uncertainty within the bounding-box, which can be leveraged to perform online bootstrapping (i.e. transforming the boxes to segmentation masks), while training the network. We evaluated our method on binary segmentation tasks, as well as a multi-class segmentation task (CityScapes vehicles and persons). We trained each task on a dataset comprised of only 18% pixel-perfect and 82% bounding-box labels, and compared the results to a baseline model trained on a completely pixel-perfect dataset. For the binary segmentation tasks, our method achieves an IoU score which is 98.33% as good as our baseline model, while for the multi-class task, our method is 97.12% as good as our baseline model (77.5 vs. 79.8 mIoU).