C3-SemiSeg: Contrastive Semi-Supervised Segmentation via Cross-Set Learning and Dynamic Class-Balancing

The semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods utilize the unlabeled data to increase the feature discriminative ability to alleviate the burden of the annotated data. However, the dominant consistency learning diagram is limited by a) the misalignment between features from labeled and unlabeled data; b) treating each image and region separately without considering crucial semantic dependencies among classes. In this work, we introduce a novel C^3-SemiSeg to improve consistency-based semi-supervised learning by exploiting better feature alignment under perturbations and enhancing discriminative of the inter-class features cross images. Specifically, we first introduce a cross-set region-level data augmentation strategy to reduce the feature discrepancy between labeled data and unlabeled data. Cross-set pixel-wise contrastive learning is further integrated into the pipeline to facilitate discriminative and consistent intra-class features in a `compared to learn' way. To stabilize training from the noisy label, we propose a dynamic confidence region selection strategy to focus on the high confidence region for loss calculation. We validate the proposed approach on Cityscapes and BDD100K dataset, which significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods.