Automated Detection of Label Errors in Semantic Segmentation Datasets via Deep Learning and Uncertainty Quantification

Matthias Rottmann, Marco Reese; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 3214-3223

In this work, we for the first time present a method for detecting labeling errors in image datasets with semantic segmentation, i.e., pixel-wise class labels. Annotation acquisition for semantic segmentation datasets is time-consuming and requires plenty of human labor. In particular, review processes are time consuming and label errors can easily be overlooked by humans. The consequences are biased benchmarks and in extreme cases also performance degradation of deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on such datasets. DNNs for semantic segmentation yield pixel-wise predictions, which makes detection of labeling errors via uncertainty quantification a complex task. Uncertainty is particularly pronounced at the transitions between connected components of the prediction. By lifting the consideration of uncertainty to the level of predicted components, we enable the usage of DNNs together with component-level uncertainty quantification for the detection of labeling errors. We present a principled approach to benchmarking the task of label error detection by dropping labels from the Cityscapes dataset as well from a dataset extracted from the CARLA driving simulator, where in the latter case we have the labels under control. Our experiments show that our approach is able to detect the vast majority of labeling errors while controlling the number of false label error detections. Furthermore, we apply our method to semantic segmentation datasets frequently used by the computer vision community and present a collection of labeling errors along with sample statistics.