Weakly-supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) has been considered as a more challenging task than weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Compared to WSSS, WSIS requires instance-wise localization, which is difficult to extract from image-level labels. To tackle the problem, most WSIS approaches use off-the-shelf proposal techniques that require pre-training with instance or object level labels, deviating the fundamental definition of the fully-image-level supervised setting. In this paper, we propose a novel approach including two innovative components. First, we propose a semantic knowledge transfer to obtain pseudo instance labels by transferring the knowledge of WSSS to WSIS while eliminating the need for the off-the-shelf proposals. Second, we propose a self-refinement method to refine the pseudo instance labels in a self-supervised scheme and to use the refined labels for training in an online manner. Here, we discover an erroneous phenomenon, semantic drift, that occurred by the missing instances in pseudo instance labels categorized as background class. This semantic drift occurs confusion between background and instance in training and consequently degrades the segmentation performance. We term this problem as semantic drift problem and show that our proposed self-refinement method eliminates the semantic drift problem. The extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and we achieve a considerable performance without off-the-shelf proposal techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/BESTIE.
Judging from Support-set: A New Way to Utilize Few-Shot Segmentation for Segmentation Refinement Process
Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁赫斯国家实验室）；Roblox（Roblox公司）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Class-agnostic object proposal generation is an important first step in many object detection pipelines. However, object proposals of modern systems are rather inaccurate in terms of segmentation and only roughly adhere to object boundaries. Since typical refinement steps are usually not applicable to thousands of proposals, we propose a superpixel-based refinement system for object proposal generation systems. Utilizing precise superpixels and superpixel pooling on deep features, we refine initial coarse proposals in an end-to-end learned system. Furthermore, we propose a novel DeepFH segment…
University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
We consider the problem of semantic image segmentation using deep convolutional neural networks. We propose a novel network architecture called the label refinement network that predicts segmentation labels in a coarse-to-fine fashion at several resolutions. The segmentation labels at a coarse resolution are used together with convolutional features to obtain finer resolution segmentation labels. We define loss functions at several stages in the network to provide supervisions at different stages. Our experimental results on several standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed model provide…
Deep learning techniques have successfully been employed in numerous computer vision tasks including image segmentation. The techniques have also been applied to medical image segmentation, one of the most critical tasks in computer-aided diagnosis. Compared with natural images, the medical image is a gray-scale image with low-contrast (even with some invisible parts). Because some organs have similar intensity and texture with neighboring organs, there is usually a need to refine automatic segmentation results. In this paper, we propose an interactive deep refinement framework to improve the …
Few-shot segmentation targets to segment new classes with few annotated images provided. It is more challenging than traditional semantic segmentation tasks that segment known classes with abundant annotated images. In this paper, we propose a Prototype Refinement Network (PRNet) to attack the challenge of few-shot segmentation. It firstly learns to bidirectionally extract prototypes from both support and query images of the known classes. Furthermore, to extract representative prototypes of the new classes, we use adaptation and fusion for prototype refinement. The step of adaptation makes th…
State-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods were almost exclusively trained on images within a fixed resolution range. These segmentations are inaccurate for very high-resolution images since using bicubic upsampling of low-resolution segmentation does not adequately capture high-resolution details along object boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the high-resolution segmentation problem without using any high-resolution training data. The key insight is our CascadePSP network which refines and corrects local boundaries whenever possible. Although our network is…
Clore: Interactive Pathology Image Segmentation with Click-based Local Refinement
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学人工智能与数据科学学院）
Recent mainstream weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) approaches mainly relies on image-level classification learning, which has limited representation capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic learning based framework, named SLAMs (Semantic Learning based Activation Map), for WSSS.
SRPR-Net: Semantic and Relational Prompt Refinement for Automated SAM-based Instance Segmentation
Ruijin-XJTLU Intelligent Medicine Institute, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（瑞金-西交利物浦智能医学研究所，瑞金医院，上海交通大学医学院）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生物医学工程学院）
As one of the fundamental tasks in computer vision, semantic segmentation plays an important role in real world applications. Although numerous deep learning models have made notable progress on several mainstream datasets with the rapid development of convolutional networks, they still encounter various challenges in practical scenarios. Unsupervised adaptive semantic segmentation aims to obtain a robust classifier trained with source domain data, which is able to maintain stable performance when deployed to a target domain with different data distribution. In this paper, we propose an innova…
State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems（智能技术与系统国家重点实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Tremendous efforts have been made on instance segmentation but the mask quality is still not satisfactory. The boundaries of predicted instance masks are usually imprecise due to the low spatial resolution of feature maps and the imbalance problem caused by the extremely low proportion of boundary pixels. To address these issues, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective post-processing refinement framework to improve the boundary quality based on the results of any instance segmentation model, termed BPR. Following the idea of looking closer to segment boundaries better, we extract and r…
BARIS: Boundary-Aware Refinement with Environmental Degradation Priors for Robust Underwater Instance Segmentation
Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University（台湾大学通信工程研究所）；Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University（台湾大学电子工程系）
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；University of Siegen（锡根大学）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation has been a subject of increased interest due to the scarcity of fully annotated images. We introduce a new approach for solving weakly supervised semantic segmentation with deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The method introduces a novel layer which applies simplex projection on the output of a neural network using area constraints of class objects. The proposed method is general and can be seamlessly integrated into any CNN architecture. Moreover, the projection layer allows strongly supervised models to be adapted to weakly supervised models ef…
Birmingham University（伯明翰大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；CUHK-Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）
Excellent performance has been achieved on instance segmentation but the quality on the boundary area remains unsatisfactory, which leads to a rising attention on boundary refinement. For practical use, an ideal post-processing refinement scheme are required to be accurate, generic and efficient. However, most of existing approaches propose pixel-wise refinement, which either introduce a massive computation cost or design specifically for different backbone models. Contour-based models are efficient and generic to be incorporated with any existing segmentation methods, but they often generate …
Precise segmentation of objects is an important problem in tasks like class-agnostic object proposal generation or instance segmentation. Deep learning-based systems usually generate segmentations of objects based on coarse feature maps, due to the inherent downsampling in CNNs. This leads to segmentation boundaries not adhering well to the object boundaries in the image. To tackle this problem, we introduce a new superpixel-based refinement approach on top of the state-of-the-art object proposal system AttentionMask. The refinement utilizes superpixel pooling for feature extraction and a nove…
CNN architectures have terrific recognition performance but rely on spatial pooling which makes it difficult to adapt them to tasks that require dense, pixel-accurate labeling. This paper makes two contributions: (1) We demonstrate that while the apparent spatial resolution of convolutional feature maps is low, the high-dimensional feature representation contains significant sub-pixel localization information. (2) We describe a multi-resolution reconstruction architecture based on a Laplacian pyramid that uses skip connections from higher resolution feature maps and multiplicative gating to su…
Instituto Superior Tecnico, University of Lisbon（里斯本大学高等技术学院）
Fire localization in images and videos is an important step for an autonomous system to combat fire incidents. State-of-art image segmentation methods based on deep neural networks require a large number of pixel-annotated samples to train Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in a fully-supervised manner. In this paper, we consider weakly supervised segmentation of fire in images, in which only image labels are used to train the network. We show that in the case of fire segmentation, which is a binary segmentation problem, the mean value of features in a mid-layer of classification CNN can per…
We propose a novel implicit feature refinement module for high-quality instance segmentation. Existing image/video instance segmentation methods rely on explicitly stacked convolutions to refine instance features before the final prediction. In this paper, we first give an empirical comparison of different refinement strategies,which reveals that the widely-used four consecutive convolutions are not necessary. As an alternative, weight-sharing convolution blocks provides competitive performance. When such block is iterated for infinite times, the block output will eventually convergeto an equi…
Despite recent improvements using fully convolutional networks, in general, the segmentation produced by most state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods does not show satisfactory adherence to the object boundaries. We propose a method to refine the segmentation results generated by such deep learning models. Our method takes as input the confidence scores generated by a pixel-dense segmentation network and re-labels pixels with low confidence levels. The re-labeling approach employs a region growing mechanism that aggregates these pixels to neighboring areas with high confidence scores an…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Tencent Hippocrates Research Labs（腾讯希波克拉底研究实验室）；Lieber Institute for Brain Development（利伯大脑发育研究所）
Instance segmentation is of great importance for many biological applications, such as study of neural cell interactions, plant phenotyping, and quantitatively measuring how cells react to drug treatment. In this paper, we propose a novel box-based instance segmentation method. Box-based instance segmentation methods capture objects via bounding boxes and then perform individual segmentation within each bounding box region. However, existing methods can hardly differentiate the target from its neighboring objects within the same bounding box region due to their similar textures and low-contras…
We propose a novel approach to weakly supervised semantic segmentation, which consists of three consecutive steps. The first two steps extract high-quality pseudo masks from image-level annotated data, which are then used to train a segmentation model on the third step. The presented approach also addresses two problems in the data: class imbalance and missing labels. Using only image-level annotations as supervision, our method is capable of segmenting various classes and complex objects. It achieves 37.34 mean IoU on the test set, placing 3rd at the LID Challenge in the task of weakly superv…
Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods usually utilize the results of pre-trained saliency detection (SD) models without explicitly modeling the connections between the two tasks, which is not the most efficient configuration. Here we propose a unified multi-task learning framework to jointly solve WSSS and SD using a single network, \ie saliency, and segmentation network (SSNet). SSNet consists of a segmentation network (SN) and a saliency aggregation module (SAM). For an input image, SN generates the segmentation result and, SAM predicts the saliency of each category…
Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) trained on a large number of images with strong pixel-level annotations have recently significantly pushed the state-of-art in semantic image segmentation. We study the more challenging problem of learning DCNNs for semantic image segmentation from either (1) weakly annotated training data such as bounding boxes or image-level labels or (2) a combination of few strongly labeled and many weakly labeled images, sourced from one or multiple datasets. We develop Expectation-Maximization (EM) methods for semantic image segmentation model training under the…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）
Semantic labelling and instance segmentation are two tasks that require particularly costly annotations. Starting from weak supervision in the form of bounding box detection annotations, we propose a new approach that does not require modification of the segmentation training procedure. We show that when carefully designing the input labels from given bounding boxes, even a single round of training is enough to improve over previously reported weakly supervised results. Overall, our weak supervision approach reaches ~95% of the quality of the fully supervised model, both for semantic labelling…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation receives much research attention since it alleviates the need to obtain a large amount of dense pixel-wise ground-truth annotations for the training images. Compared with other forms of weak supervision, image labels are quite efficient to obtain. In our work, we focus on the weakly supervised semantic segmentation with image label annotations. Recent progress for this task has been largely dependent on the quality of generated pseudo-annotations. In this work, inspired by spatial neural-attention for image captioning, we propose a decoupled spatial neur…
We present a weakly supervised model that jointly performs both semantic- and instance-segmentation -- a particularly relevant problem given the substantial cost of obtaining pixel-perfect annotation for these tasks. In contrast to many popular instance segmentation approaches based on object detectors, our method does not predict any overlapping instances. Moreover, we are able to segment both "thing" and "stuff" classes, and thus explain all the pixels in the image. "Thing" classes are weakly-supervised with bounding boxes, and "stuff" with image-level tags. We obtain state-of-the-art result…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation aims to assign each pixel a semantic category under weak supervisions, such as image-level tags. Most of existing weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods do not use any feedback from segmentation output and can be considered as open-loop systems. They are prone to accumulated errors because of the static seeds and the sensitive structure information. In this paper, we propose a generic self-adaptation mechanism for existing weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods by introducing two feedback chains, thus constituting a closed-loop system. …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；VIVO Inc.（维沃移动通信有限公司）
Humans have a strong class-agnostic object segmentation ability and can outline boundaries of unknown objects precisely, which motivates us to propose a box-supervised class-agnostic object segmentation (BoxCaseg) based solution for weakly-supervised instance segmentation. The BoxCaseg model is jointly trained using box-supervised images and salient images in a multi-task learning manner. The fine-annotated salient images provide class-agnostic and precise object localization guidance for box-supervised images. The object masks predicted by a pretrained BoxCaseg model are refined via a novel m…
We introduce a new loss function for the weakly-supervised training of semantic image segmentation models based on three guiding principles: to seed with weak localization cues, to expand objects based on the information about which classes can occur in an image, and to constrain the segmentations to coincide with object boundaries. We show experimentally that training a deep convolutional neural network using the proposed loss function leads to substantially better segmentations than previous state-of-the-art methods on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset. We furthermore give insight into…
Weakly supervised instance segmentation reduces the cost of annotations required to train models. However, existing approaches which rely only on image-level class labels predominantly suffer from errors due to (a) partial segmentation of objects and (b) missing object predictions. We show that these issues can be better addressed by training with weakly labeled videos instead of images. In videos, motion and temporal consistency of predictions across frames provide complementary signals which can help segmentation. We are the first to explore the use of these video signals to tackle weakly su…
Artificial Intelligence eXploration Research Center, The University of Electro Communications（电气通信大学人工智能探索研究中心）
To minimize the annotation costs associated with the training of semantic segmentation models, researchers have extensively investigated weakly-supervised segmentation approaches. In the current weakly-supervised segmentation methods, the most widely adopted approach is based on visualization. However, the visualization results are not generally equal to semantic segmentation. Therefore, to perform accurate semantic segmentation under the weakly supervised condition, it is necessary to consider the mapping functions that convert the visualization results into semantic segmentation. For such ma…
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing（上海市智能信息处理重点实验室）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）
Text segmentation is a challenging vision task with many downstream applications. Current text segmentation methods require pixel-level annotations, which are expensive in the cost of human labor and limited in application scenarios. In this paper, we take the first attempt to perform weakly-supervised text instance segmentation by bridging text recognition and text segmentation. The insight is that text recognition methods provide precise attention position of each text instance, and the attention location can feed to both a text adaptive refinement head (TAR) and a text segmentation head. Sp…
Brigham Young University（杨百翰大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）
As deep neural networks become the state-of-the-art approach in the field of computer vision for dense prediction tasks, many methods have been developed for automatic estimation of the target outputs given the visual inputs. Although the estimation accuracy of the proposed automatic methods continues to improve, interactive refinement is oftentimes necessary for further correction. Recently, feature backpropagating refinement scheme (f-BRS) has been proposed for the task of interactive segmentation, which enables efficient optimization of a small set of auxiliary variables inserted into the p…
POSTECH（浦项工科大学）；DGIST（大邱庆北科学技术院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
We propose a novel algorithm for weakly supervised semantic segmentation based on image-level class labels only. In weakly supervised setting, it is commonly observed that trained model overly focuses on discriminative parts rather than the entire object area. Our goal is to overcome this limitation with no additional human intervention by retrieving videos relevant to target class labels from web repository, and generating segmentation labels from the retrieved videos to simulate strong supervision for semantic segmentation. During this process, we take advantage of image classification with …
We present a weakly supervised instance segmentation algorithm based on deep community learning with multiple tasks. This task is formulated as a combination of weakly supervised object detection and semantic segmentation, where individual objects of the same class are identified and segmented separately. We address this problem by designing a unified deep neural network architecture, which has a positive feedback loop of object detection with bounding box regression, instance mask generation, instance segmentation, and feature extraction. Each component of the network makes active interaction…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）
Recent progress in semantic segmentation is driven by deep Convolutional Neural Networks and large-scale labeled image datasets. However, data labeling for pixel-wise segmentation is tedious and costly. Moreover, a trained model can only make predictions within a set of pre-defined classes. In this paper, we present CANet, a class-agnostic segmentation network that performs few-shot segmentation on new classes with only a few annotated images available. Our network consists of a two-branch dense comparison module which performs multi-level feature comparison between the support image and the q…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Training a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) for semantic segmentation requires a large number of masks with pixel level labelling, which involves a large amount of human labour and time for annotation. In contrast, web images and their image-level labels are much easier and cheaper to obtain. In this work, we propose a novel method for weakly supervised semantic segmentation with only image-level labels. The method utilizes the internet to retrieve a large number of images and uses a large scale co-segmentation framework to generate masks for the retrieved images. We first retrieve images fro…
Weakly supervised instance segmentation has gained popularity because it reduces high annotation cost of pixel-level masks required for model training. Recent approaches for weakly supervised instance segmentation detect and segment objects using appearance information obtained from a static image. However, it poses the challenge of identifying objects with a non-discriminatory appearance. In this study, we address this problem by using motion information from image sequences. We propose a two-stream encoder that leverages appearance and motion features extracted from images and optical flows.…
iSeg: An Iterative Refinement-based Framework for Training-free Segmentation
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学电气与信息工程学院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；School of Big Data and Software Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学大数据与软件工程学院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Linkoping University（林雪平大学）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Of late, weakly supervised object detection is with great importance in object recognition. Based on deep learning, weakly supervised detectors have achieved many promising results. However, compared with fully supervised detection, it is more challenging to train deep network based detectors in a weakly supervised manner. Here we formulate weakly supervised detection as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem, where instance classifiers (object detectors) are put into the network as hidden nodes. We propose a novel online instance classifier refinement algorithm to integrate MIL and the in…
This report introduces the technical details of the team FuXi-Fresher for LVIS Challenge 2021. Our method focuses on the problem in following two aspects: the long-tail distribution and the segmentation quality of mask and boundary. Based on the advanced HTC instance segmentation algorithm, we connect transformer backbone(Swin-L) through composite connections inspired by CBNetv2 to enhance the baseline results. To alleviate the problem of long-tail distribution, we design a Distribution Balanced method which includes dataset balanced and loss function balaced modules. Further, we use a Mask an…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation has attracted much research interest in recent years considering its advantage of low labeling cost. Most of the advanced algorithms follow the design principle that expands and constrains the seed regions from class activation maps (CAM). As well-known, conventional CAM tends to be incomplete or over-activated due to weak supervision. Fortunately, we find that semantic segmentation has a characteristic of spatial transformation equivariance, which can form a few self-supervisions to help weakly supervised learning. This work mainly explores the advantag…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；ASRI（先进技术研究中心）；INMC（纳米材料与技术研究所）；ISRC（智能系统研究中心）；Institute of Engineering Research（工程研究院）
Weakly supervised segmentation methods using bounding box annotations focus on obtaining a pixel-level mask from each box containing an object. Existing methods typically depend on a class-agnostic mask generator, which operates on the low-level information intrinsic to an image. In this work, we utilize higher-level information from the behavior of a trained object detector, by seeking the smallest areas of the image from which the object detector produces almost the same result as it does from the whole image. These areas constitute a bounding-box attribution map (BBAM), which identifies the…
Télécom Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎电信学院）；Università di Napoli Parthenope（那不勒斯帕泰诺佩大学）；La Rochelle Université（拉罗谢尔大学）
Semantic segmentation is a fundamental topic in computer vision. Several deep learning methods have been proposed for semantic segmentation with outstanding results. However, these models require a lot of densely annotated images. To address this problem, we propose a new algorithm that uses HyperGraph Convolutional Networks for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation (HyperGCN-WSS). Our algorithm constructs spatial and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) graphs from the images in the dataset to generate the hypergraphs. Then, we train a specialized HyperGraph Convolutional Network (HyperGCN) architectu…
