Class activation map guided level sets for weakly supervised semantic segmentation

Abstract

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) aims to achieve pixel-level fine-grained image segmentation using only weak guidance such as image-level class labels, thus significantly decreasing annotation costs. Despite the impressive performance showcased by current state-of-the-art WSSS approaches, the lack of precise object localisation limits their segmentation accuracy, especially for pixels close to object boundaries. To address this issue, we propose a novel class activation map (CAM)-based level set method to effectively improve the quality of pseudo-labels by exploring the capability of level sets to enhance the segmentation accuracy at object boundaries. To speed up the level set evolution process, we use Fourier neural operators to simulate the dynamic evolution of our level set method. Extensive experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms existing WSSS methods on both PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO datasets.