CIAN: Cross-Image Affinity Net for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation based on image-level labels aims for alleviating the data scarcity problem by training with coarse labels. State-of-the-art methods rely on image-level labels to generate proxy segmentation masks, then train the segmentation network on these masks with various constraints. These methods consider each image independently and lack the exploration of cross-image relationships. We argue the cross-image relationship is vital to weakly supervised learning. We propose an end-to-end affinity module for explicitly modeling the relationship among a group of images. By means of this, one image can benefit from the complementary information from other images, and the supervision guidance can be shared in the group. The proposed method improves over the baseline with a large margin. Our method achieves 64.1\% mIOU score on Pascal VOC 2012 validation set, and 64.7\% mIOU score on test set, which is a new state-of-the-art by only using image-level labels, demonstrating the effectiveness of the method.