An Alternative to WSSS? An Empirical Study of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) on Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Problems

2 May 2023  ·  Weixuan Sun, Zheyuan Liu, Yanhao Zhang, Yiran Zhong, Nick Barnes ·

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated exceptional performance and versatility, making it a promising tool for various related tasks. In this report, we explore the application of SAM in Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS). Particularly, we adapt SAM as the pseudo-label generation pipeline given only the image-level class labels. While we observed impressive results in most cases, we also identify certain limitations. Our study includes performance evaluations on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO, where we achieved remarkable improvements over the latest state-of-the-art methods on both datasets. We anticipate that this report encourages further explorations of adopting SAM in WSSS, as well as wider real-world applications.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation COCO 2014 val WSSS-SAM(DeepLabV2-ResNet101) mIoU 55.6 # 3
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation PASCAL VOC 2012 test WSSS-SAM(DeepLabV2-ResNet101) Mean IoU 77.1 # 6
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation PASCAL VOC 2012 val WSSS-SAM(ResNet-101, multi-stage) Mean IoU 77.2 # 7

Methods