Interactive Semantic Segmentation With Weak Supervision

Lei Gong, Da-Han Wang, Yun Wu, Haili Ye, Chenyan Zhu

Abstract: At present, the most advanced semantic segmentation model training mainly relies on pixel-level annotation, that is, annotating the category of each pixel of an image. Such annotation usually is time-consuming and expensive, especially for special applications that require expert annotation. The weakly-supervised segmentation method using the point-level supervision information has been investigated which however has great problems that the supervision information is quite limited and the performance is far from fully supervised methods. In this paper, we proposes an novelty interactive image segmentation method based on weak supervision, which allows multiple feedbacks of easily obtained weakly supervised information and improves the efficiency of utility of the supervision information. In the downstream task (interactive image segmentation), supervised information at the point level is used for many times, which makes the connection between pixels in the upstream task become closer and improves the segmentation accuracy. First, image-level tags are used to train the classification network. Then the pseudo-semantic labels are generated and put into the interactive segmentation network for training, and an almost completely supervised CNN is obtained, which further improves the performance and provides operability for human-computer interaction. The proposed method achieves promising semantic segmentation results that are close to those obtained by strongly supervised segmentation methods on the PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets.