Training a deep network to perform semantic segmentation requires large amounts of labeled data. To alleviate the manual effort of annotating real images, researchers have investigated the use of synthetic data, which can be labeled automatically. Unfortunately, a network trained on synthetic data performs relatively poorly on real images. While this can be addressed by domain adaptation, existing methods all require having access to real images during training. In this paper, we introduce a drastically different way to handle synthetic images that does not require seeing any real images at training time. Our approach builds on the observation that foreground and background classes are not affected in the same manner by the domain shift, and thus should be treated differently. In particular, the former should be handled in a detection-based manner to better account for the fact that, while their texture in synthetic images is not photo-realistic, their shape looks natural. Our experiments evidence the effectiveness of our approach on Cityscapes and CamVid with models trained on synthetic data only.
Semantic segmentation, that is, understanding an image at pixel-level, has been widely studied by the computer vision community @cite_33 @cite_13 @cite_42 @cite_43 @cite_48 @cite_8 @cite_23 @cite_7 @cite_35 @cite_51 @cite_45 @cite_37 . As for many other tasks, the most recent techniques rely on deep networks @cite_51 @cite_7 @cite_37 @cite_35 . Unfortunately, in contrast with image recognition problems, obtaining fully-supervised data for semantic segmentation, with pixel-level annotations, is very expensive and time-consuming. Two trends have therefore been investigated to overcome this limitation: Weakly-supervised methods and the use of synthetic data.
@cite_35 @cite_37 @cite_33 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_48 @cite_42 @cite_43 @cite_45 @cite_23 @cite_51 @cite_13
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We present a weakly-supervised approach to semantic segmentation. The goal is to assign pixel-level labels given only partial information, for example, image-level labels. This is an important problem in many application scenarios where it is difficult to get accurate segmentation or not feasible to obtain detailed annotations. The proposed approach starts with an initial coarse segmentation, followed by a spectral clustering approach that groups related image parts into communities. A community-driven graph is then constructed that captures spatial and feature relationships between communities while a label graph captures correlations between image labels. Finally, mapping the image level labels to appropriate communities is formulated as a convex optimization problem. The proposed approach does not require location information for image level labels and can be trained using partially labeled datasets. Compared to the state-of-the-art weakly supervised approaches, we achieve a significant performance improvement of 9 on MSRC-21 dataset and 11 on LabelMe dataset, while being more than 300 times faster. Semantic segmentation requires a detailed labeling of image pixels by object category. Information derived from local image patches is necessary to describe the detailed shape of individual objects. However, this information is ambiguous and can result in noisy labels. Global inference of image content can instead capture the general semantic concepts present. We advocate that high-recall holistic inference of image concepts provides valuable information for detailed pixel labeling. We build a two-stream neural network architecture that facilitates information flow from holistic information to local pixels, while keeping common image features shared among the low-level layers of both the holistic analysis and segmentation branches. We empirically evaluate our network on four standard semantic segmentation datasets. Our network obtains state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL-Context and NYUDv2, and ablation studies verify its effectiveness on ADE20K and SIFT-Flow. We address the task of learning a semantic segmentation from weakly supervised data. Our aim is to devise a system that predicts an object label for each pixel by making use of only image level labels during training – the information whether a certain object is present or not in the image. Such coarse tagging of images is faster and easier to obtain as opposed to the tedious task of pixelwise labeling required in state of the art systems. We cast this task naturally as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. We use Semantic Texton Forest (STF) as the basic framework and extend it for the MIL setting. We make use of multitask learning (MTL) to regularize our solution. Here, an external task of geometric context estimation is used to improve on the task of semantic segmentation. We report experimental results on the MSRC21 and the very challenging VOC2007 datasets. On MSRC21 dataset we are able, by using 276 weakly labeled images, to achieve the performance of a supervised STF trained on pixelwise labeled training set of 56 images, which is a significant reduction in supervision needed. Image semantic segmentation is the task of partitioning image into several regions based on semantic concepts. In this paper, we learn a weakly supervised semantic segmentation model from social images whose labels are not pixel-level but image-level; furthermore, these labels might be noisy. We present a joint conditional random field model leveraging various contexts to address this issue. More specifically, we extract global and local features in multiple scales by convolutional neural network and topic model. Inter-label correlations are captured by visual contextual cues and label co-occurrence statistics. The label consistency between image-level and pixel-level is finally achieved by iterative refinement. Experimental results on two real-world image datasets PASCAL VOC2007 and SIFT-Flow demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods and even achieves accuracy comparable with fully supervised methods.