A weakly-supervised semantic segmentation framework with a tied deconvolutional neural network is presented. Each deconvolution layer in the framework consists of unpooling and deconvolution operations. 'Unpooling' upsamples the input feature map based on unpooling switches defined by corresponding convolution layer's pooling operation. 'Deconvolution' convolves the input unpooled features by using convolutional weights tied with the corresponding convolution layer's convolution operation. The unpooling-deconvolution combination helps to eliminate less discriminative features in a feature extraction stage, since output features of the deconvolution layer are reconstructed from the most discriminative unpooled features instead of the raw one. This results in reduction of false positives in a pixel-level inference stage. All the feature maps restored from the entire deconvolution layers can constitute a rich discriminative feature set according to different abstraction levels. Those features are stacked to be selectively used for generating class-specific activation maps. Under the weak supervision (image-level labels), the proposed framework shows promising results on lesion segmentation in medical images (chest X-rays) and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PASCAL VOC segmentation dataset in the same experimental condition.
We present an approach to learn a dense pixel-wise labeling from image-level tags. Each image-level tag imposes constraints on the output labeling of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier. We propose Constrained CNN (CCNN), a method which uses a novel loss function to optimize for any set of linear constraints on the output space (i.e. predicted label distribution) of a CNN. Our loss formulation is easy to optimize and can be incorporated directly into standard stochastic gradient descent optimization. The key idea is to phrase the training objective as a biconvex optimization for linear models, which we then relax to nonlinear deep networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generality of our new learning framework. The constrained loss yields state-of-the-art results on weakly supervised semantic image segmentation. We further demonstrate that adding slightly more supervision can greatly improve the performance of the learning algorithm.