Affinity attention graph neural network for weakly supervised semantic segmentation

Bingfeng Zhang, Jimin Xiao, Jianbo Jiao, Yunchao Wei, Yao Zhao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)
83 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is receiving great attention due to its low human annotation cost. In this paper, we aim to tackle bounding box supervised semantic segmentation, i.e., training accurate semantic segmentation models using bounding box annotations as supervision. To this end, we propose affinity attention graph neural network (A2GNN). Following previous practices, we first generate pseudo semantic-aware seeds, which are then formed into semantic graphs based on our newly proposed affinity Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then the built graphs are input to our A2GNN, in which an affinity attention layer is designed to acquire the short- and long- distance information from soft graph edges to accurately propagate semantic labels from the confident seeds to the unlabeled pixels. However, to guarantee the precision of the seeds, we only adopt a limited number of confident pixel seed labels for A2GNN, which may lead to insufficient supervision for training. To alleviate this issue, we further introduce a new loss function and a consistency-checking mechanism to leverage the bounding box constraint, so that more reliable guidance can be included for the model optimization. Experiments show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performances on Pascal VOC 2012 datasets (val: 76.5 percent, test: 75.2 percent). More importantly, our approach can be readily applied to bounding box supervised instance segmentation task or other weakly supervised semantic segmentation tasks, with state-of-the-art or comparable performance among almot all weakly supervised tasks on PASCAL VOC or COCO dataset. Our source code will be available at https://github.com/zbf1991/A2GNN.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9440699
Pages (from-to)8082-8096
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Volume44
Issue number11
Early online date25 May 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 1979-2012 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Weakly supervised
  • semantic segmentation
  • graph neural network

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Applied Mathematics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Affinity attention graph neural network for weakly supervised semantic segmentation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this