Active Learning for Image Segmentation with Binary User Feedback

Debanjan Goswami, Shayok Chakraborty; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 9138-9147

Deep learning algorithms have depicted commendable performance in a variety of computer vision applications. However training a robust deep neural network necessitates a large amount of labeled training data which is time-consuming and labor-intensive to acquire. This problem is even more serious for an application like image segmentation as the human oracle has to hand-annotate each and every pixel in a given training image which is extremely laborious. Active learning algorithms automatically identify the salient and exemplar samples from large amounts of unlabeled data and tremendously reduce human annotation effort in inducing a machine learning model. In this paper we propose a novel active learning algorithm for image segmentation with the goal of further reducing the labeling burden on the human oracles. Our framework identifies a batch of informative images together with a list of semantic classes for each and the human annotator merely needs to answer whether a given semantic class is present or absent in a given image. To the best of our knowledge this is the first research effort to develop an active learning framework for image segmentation which poses only binary (yes/no) queries to the users. We pose the image and class selection as a constrained optimization problem and derive a linear programming relaxation to select a batch of (image-class) pairs which are maximally informative to the underlying deep neural network. Our extensive empirical studies on three challenging datasets corroborate the potential of our method in substantially reducing human annotation effort for real-world image segmentation applications.