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Learning Self-supervised Low-Rank Network for Single-Stage Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation

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Abstract

Semantic segmentation with limited annotations, such as weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) and semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS), is a challenging task that has attracted much attention recently. Most leading WSSS methods employ a sophisticated multi-stage training strategy to estimate pseudo-labels as precise as possible, but they suffer from high model complexity. In contrast, there exists another research line that trains a single network with image-level labels in one training cycle. However, such a single-stage strategy often performs poorly because of the compounding effect caused by inaccurate pseudo-label estimation. To address this issue, this paper presents a Self-supervised Low-Rank Network (SLRNet) for single-stage WSSS and SSSS. The SLRNet uses cross-view self-supervision, that is, it simultaneously predicts several complementary attentive LR representations from different views of an image to learn precise pseudo-labels. Specifically, we reformulate the LR representation learning as a collective matrix factorization problem and optimize it jointly with the network learning in an end-to-end manner. The resulting LR representation deprecates noisy information while capturing stable semantics across different views, making it robust to the input variations, thereby reducing overfitting to self-supervision errors. The SLRNet can provide a unified single-stage framework for various label-efficient semantic segmentation settings: (1) WSSS with image-level labeled data, (2) SSSS with a few pixel-level labeled data, and (3) SSSS with a few pixel-level labeled data and many image-level labeled data. Extensive experiments on the Pascal VOC 2012, COCO, and L2ID datasets demonstrate that our SLRNet outperforms both state-of-the-art WSSS and SSSS methods with a variety of different settings, proving its good generalizability and efficacy.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2019YFB2101904, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61732011, 61876127, 61876088 and 61925602.

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Correspondence to Pengfei Zhu.

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Communicated by Zhouchen Lin.

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Pan, J., Zhu, P., Zhang, K. et al. Learning Self-supervised Low-Rank Network for Single-Stage Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation. Int J Comput Vis 130, 1181–1195 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-022-01590-z

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