Sparse Reconstruction for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

We propose a novel approach to semantic segmentation using weakly supervised labels. In traditional fully supervised methods, superpixel labels are available for training; however, it is not easy to obtain enough labeled superpixels to learn a satisfying model for semantic segmentation. By contrast, only image-level labels are necessary in weakly supervised methods, which makes them more practical in real applications. In this paper we develop a new way of evaluating classification models for semantic segmentation given weekly supervised labels. For a certain category, provided the classification model parameter, we firstly learn the basis superpixels by sparse reconstruction, and then evaluate the parameters by measuring the reconstruction errors among negative and positive superpixels. Based on Gaussian Mixture Models, we use Iterative Merging Update (IMU) algorithm to obtain the best parameters for the classification models. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing weakly supervised methods, and it also competes with state-of-the-art fully supervised methods.