Pseudo-label Alignment for Semi-supervised Instance Segmentation

Pseudo-labeling is significant for semi-supervised instance segmentation, which generates instance masks and classes from unannotated images for subsequent training. However, in existing pipelines, pseudo-labels that contain valuable information may be directly filtered out due to mismatches in class and mask quality. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, called pseudo-label aligning instance segmentation (PAIS), in this paper. In PAIS, we devise a dynamic aligning loss (DALoss) that adjusts the weights of semi-supervised loss terms with varying class and mask score pairs. Through extensive experiments conducted on the COCO and Cityscapes datasets, we demonstrate that PAIS is a promising framework for semisupervised instance segmentation, particularly in cases where labeled data is severely limited. Notably, with just 1% labeled data, PAIS achieves 21.2 mAP (based on MaskRCNN) and 19.9 mAP (based on K-Net) on the COCO dataset, outperforming the current state-of-the-art model, i.e., NoisyBoundary with 7.7 mAP, by a margin of over 12 points.