Pixel-level annotations are expensive and time consuming to obtain. Hence, weak supervision using only image tags could have a significant impact in semantic segmentation. Recently, CNN-based methods have proposed to fine-tune pre-trained networks using image tags. Without additional information, this leads to poor localization accuracy. This problem, however, was alleviated by making use of objectness priors to generate foreground background masks. Unfortunately these priors either require pixel-level annotations bounding boxes, or still yield inaccurate object boundaries. Here, we propose a novel method to extract accurate masks from networks pre-trained for the task of object recognition, thus forgoing external objectness modules. We first show how foreground background masks can be obtained from the activations of higher-level convolutional layers of a network. We then show how to obtain multi-class masks by the fusion of foreground background ones with information extracted from a weakly-supervised localization network. Our experiments evidence that exploiting these masks in conjunction with a weakly-supervised training loss yields state-of-the-art tag-based weakly-supervised semantic segmentation results.
Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation has attracted a lot of attention, because it alleviates the painstaking process of manually generating pixel-level training annotations. Over the years, great progress has been made @cite_28 @cite_49 @cite_42 @cite_11 @cite_3 @cite_30 @cite_45 @cite_17 @cite_0 @cite_13 @cite_12 @cite_23 @cite_38 @cite_48 @cite_21 . In particular, recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been applied to the task of weakly-supervised segmentation with great success. In this section, we discuss these CNN-based approaches, which are the ones most related to our work.
@cite_30 @cite_38 @cite_28 @cite_48 @cite_42 @cite_21 @cite_17 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_45 @cite_49 @cite_23 @cite_13 @cite_12 @cite_11
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This paper addresses the problem of weakly supervised semantic image segmentation. Our goal is to label every pixel in a new image, given only image-level object labels associated with training images. Our problem statement differs from common semantic segmentation, where pixel-wise annotations are typically assumed available in training. We specify a novel deep architecture which fuses three distinct computation processes toward semantic segmentation &#x2013; namely, (i) the bottom-up computation of neural activations in a CNN for the image-level prediction of object classes, (ii) the top-down estimation of conditional likelihoods of the CNNs activations given the predicted objects, resulting in probabilistic attention maps per object class, and (iii) the lateral attention-message passing from neighboring neurons at the same CNN layer. The fusion of (i)-(iii) is realized via a conditional random field as recurrent network aimed at generating a smooth and boundary-preserving segmentation. Unlike existing work, we formulate a unified end-to-end learning of all components of our deep architecture. Evaluation on the benchmark PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset demonstrates that we outperform reasonable weakly supervised baselines and state-of-the-art approaches. Abstract Weakly-supervised learning based on, e.g., partially labelled images or image-tags, is currently attracting significant attention in CNN segmentation as it can mitigate the need for full and laborious pixel voxel annotations. Enforcing high-order (global) inequality constraints on the network output (for instance, to constrain the size of the target region) can leverage unlabeled data, guiding the training process with domain-specific knowledge. Inequality constraints are very flexible because they do not assume exact prior knowledge. However, constrained Lagrangian dual optimization has been largely avoided in deep networks, mainly for computational tractability reasons. To the best of our knowledge, the method of (2015a) is the only prior work that addresses deep CNNs with linear constraints in weakly supervised segmentation. It uses the constraints to synthesize fully-labeled training masks (proposals) from weak labels, mimicking full supervision and facilitating dual optimization. We propose to introduce a differentiable penalty, which enforces inequality constraints directly in the loss function, avoiding expensive Lagrangian dual iterates and proposal generation. From constrained-optimization perspective, our simple penalty-based approach is not optimal as there is no guarantee that the constraints are satisfied. However, surprisingly, it yields substantially better results than the Lagrangian-based constrained CNNs in (2015a) , while reducing the computational demand for training. By annotating only a small fraction of the pixels, the proposed approach can reach a level of segmentation performance that is comparable to full supervision on three separate tasks. While our experiments focused on basic linear constraints such as the target-region size and image tags, our framework can be easily extended to other non-linear constraints, e.g., invariant shape moments (Klodt and Cremers, 2011) and other region statistics (, 2014). Therefore, it has the potential to close the gap between weakly and fully supervised learning in semantic medical image segmentation. Our code is publicly available. Most of the leading Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models for semantic segmentation exploit a large number of pixel–level annotations. Such a human based labeling requires a considerable effort that complicates the creation of large–scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach that uses bounding box annotations to train a semantic segmentation network. Indeed, the bounding box supervision, even though less accurate, is a valuable alternative, effective in reducing the dataset collection costs. The proposed method is based on a two stage training procedure: first, a deep neural network is trained to distinguish the relevant object from the background inside a given bounding box; then, the output of the network is used to provide a weak supervision for a multi–class segmentation CNN. The performances of our approach have been assessed on the Pascal–VOC 2012 segmentation dataset, obtaining competitive results compared to a fully supervised setting. Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNNs) trained on a large number of images with strong pixel-level annotations have become the new state of the art for the semantic segmentation task. While there have been recent attempts to learn FCNNs from image-level weak annotations , they need additional constraints, such as the size of an object , to obtain reasonable performance. To address this issue, we present motion-CNN (M-CNN), a novel FCNN framework which incorporates motion cues and is learned from video-level weak annotations. Our learning scheme to train the network uses motion segments as soft constraints, thereby handling noisy motion information. When trained on weakly-annotated videos, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approach on the PASCAL VOC 2012 image segmentation benchmark. We also demonstrate that the performance of M-CNN learned with 150 weak video annotations is on par with state-of-the-art weakly-supervised methods trained with thousands of images. Finally, M-CNN substantially out-performs recent approaches in a related task of video co-localization on the YouTube-Objects dataset.