Towards Noiseless Object Contours for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Image-level label based weakly supervised semantic segmentation has attracted much attention since image labels are very easy to obtain. Existing methods usually generate pseudo labels from class activation map (CAM) and then train a segmentation model. CAM usually highlights partial objects and produce incomplete pseudo labels. Some methods explore object contour by training a contour model with CAM seed label supervision and then propagate CAM score from discriminative regions to non-discriminative regions with contour guidance. The propagation process suffers from the noisy intra-object contours, and inadequate propagation results produce incomplete pseudo labels. This is because the coarse CAM seed label lacks sufficient precise semantic information to suppress contour noise. In this paper, we train a SANCE model which utilizes an auxiliary segmentation module to supplement high-level semantic information for contour training by backbone feature sharing and online label supervision. The auxiliary segmentation module also provides more accurate localization map than CAM for pseudo label generation. We evaluate our approach on Pascal VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.