GraphNet: Learning Image Pseudo Annotations for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly-supervised semantic image segmentation suffers from lacking accurate pixel-level annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel graph convolutional network-based method, called GraphNet, to learn pixel-wise labels from weak annotations. Firstly, we construct a graph on the superpixels of a training image by combining the low-level spatial relation and high-level semantic content. Meanwhile, scribble or bounding box annotations are embedded into the graph, respectively. Then, GraphNet takes the graph as input and learns to predict high-confidence pseudo image masks by a convolutional network operating directly on graphs. At last, a segmentation network is trained supervised by these pseudo image masks. We comprehensively conduct experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and PASCAL-CONTEXT segmentation benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that GraphNet is effective to predict the pixel labels with scribble or bounding box annotations. The proposed framework yields state-of-the-art results in the community.