Learning to Segment Under Various Forms of Weak Supervision

Jia Xu, Alexander G. Schwing, Raquel Urtasun; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015, pp. 3781-3790

Despite the promising performance of conventional fully supervised algorithms, semantic segmentation has remained an important, yet challenging task. Due to the limited availability of complete annotations, it is of great interest to design solutions for semantic segmentation that take into account weakly labeled data, which is readily available at a much larger scale. Contrasting the common theme to develop a different algorithm for each type of weak annotation, in this work, we propose a unified approach that incorporates various forms of weak supervision -- image level tags, bounding boxes, and partial labels -- to produce a pixel-wise labeling. We conduct a rigorous evaluation on the challenging Siftflow dataset for various weakly labeled settings, and show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by $12\%$ on per-class accuracy, while maintaining comparable per-pixel accuracy.