Learning Integral Objects With Intra-Class Discriminator for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Image-level weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) aims at learning semantic segmentation by adopting only image class labels. Existing approaches generally rely on class activation maps (CAM) to generate pseudo-masks and then train segmentation models. The main difficulty is that the CAM estimate only covers partial foreground objects. In this paper, we argue that the critical factor preventing to obtain the full object mask is the classification boundary mismatch problem in applying the CAM to WSSS. Because the CAM is optimized by the classification task, it focuses on the discrimination across different image-level classes. However, the WSSS requires to distinguish pixels sharing the same image-level class to separate them into the foreground and the background. To alleviate this contradiction, we propose an efficient end-to-end Intra-Class Discriminator (ICD) framework, which learns intra-class boundaries to help separate the foreground and the background within each image-level class. Without bells and whistles, our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance of image label based WSSS, with mIoU 68.0% on the VOC 2012 semantic segmentation benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.