In this work, we present a novel and effective framework to facilitate object detection with the instance-level segmentation information that is only supervised by bounding box annotation. Starting from the joint object detection and instance segmentation network, we propose to recursively estimate the pseudo ground-truth object masks from the instance-level object segmentation network training, and then enhance the detection network with top-down segmentation feedbacks. The pseudo ground truth mask and network parameters are optimized alternatively to mutually benefit each other. To obtain the promising pseudo masks in each iteration, we embed a graphical inference that incorporates the low-level image appearance consistency and the bounding box annotations to refine the segmentation masks predicted by the segmentation network. Our approach progressively improves the object detection performance by incorporating the detailed pixel-wise information learned from the weakly-supervised segmentation network. Extensive evaluation on the detection task in PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 [12] verifies that the proposed approach is effective.
Large-scale data is of crucial importance for learning semantic segmentation models, but annotating per-pixel masks is a tedious and inefficient procedure. We note that for the topic of interactive image segmentation, scribbles are very widely used in academic research and commercial software, and are recognized as one of the most userfriendly ways of interacting. In this paper, we propose to use scribbles to annotate images, and develop an algorithm to train convolutional networks for semantic segmentation supervised by scribbles. Our algorithm is based on a graphical model that jointly propagates information from scribbles to unmarked pixels and learns network parameters. We present competitive object semantic segmentation results on the PASCAL VOC dataset by using scribbles as annotations. Scribbles are also favored for annotating stuff (e.g., water, sky, grass) that has no well-defined shape, and our method shows excellent results on the PASCALCONTEXT dataset thanks to extra inexpensive scribble annotations. Our scribble annotations on PASCAL VOC are available at http: research.microsoft.com en-us um people jifdai downloads scribble_sup. Recent leading approaches to semantic segmentation rely on deep convolutional networks trained with human-annotated, pixel-level segmentation masks. Such pixel-accurate supervision demands expensive labeling effort and limits the performance of deep networks that usually benefit from more training data. In this paper, we propose a method that achieves competitive accuracy but only requires easily obtained bounding box annotations. The basic idea is to iterate between automatically generating region proposals and training convolutional networks. These two steps gradually recover segmentation masks for improving the networks, and vise versa. Our method, called "BoxSup", produces competitive results (e.g., 62.0 mAP for validation) supervised by boxes only, on par with strong baselines (e.g., 63.8 mAP) fully supervised by masks under the same setting. By leveraging a large amount of bounding boxes, BoxSup further yields state-of-the-art results on PASCAL VOC 2012 and PASCAL-CONTEXT [26]. 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 and instance segmentation. 