Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning from a Class-wise Memory Bank

Iñigo Alonso, Alberto Sabater, David Ferstl, Luis Montesano, Ana C. Murillo

Abstract: This work presents a novel approach for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. The key element of this approach is our contrastive learning module that enforces the segmentation network to yield similar pixel-level feature representations for same-class samples across the whole dataset. To achieve this, we maintain a memory bank which is continuously updated with relevant and high-quality feature vectors from labeled data. In an end-to-end training, the features from both labeled and unlabeled data are optimized to be similar to same-class samples from the memory bank. Our approach not only outperforms the current state-of-the-art for semi-supervised semantic segmentation but also for semi-supervised domain adaptation on well-known public benchmarks, with larger improvements on the most challenging scenarios, i.e., less available labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/Shathe/SemiSeg-Contrastive