A Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Network by Aggregating Seed Cues: The Multi-Object Proposal Generation Perspective

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation under image-level annotations is effectiveness for real-world applications. The small and sparse discriminative regions obtained froman image classification network that are typically used as the important initial location of semantic segmentation also form the bottleneck. Although deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have exhibited promising performances for single-label image classification tasks, images of the real-world usually contain multiple categories, which is still an open problem. So, the problem of obtaining high-confidence discriminative regions from multi-label classification networks remains unsolved. To solve this problem, this article proposes an innovative three-step framework within the perspective of multi-object proposal generation. First, an image is divided into candidate boxes using the object proposal method. The candidate boxes are sent to a single-classification network to obtain the discriminative regions. Second, the discriminative regions are aggregated to obtain a high-confidence seed map. Third, the seed cues grow on the feature maps of high-level semantics produced by a backbone segmentation network. Experiments are carried out on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset to verify the effectiveness of our approach, which is shown to outperform other baseline image segmentation methods.