Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation by Exploring Entire Object Regions

Weakly supervised instance segmentation with image-level class supervision is a challenging task as it associates the highest-level instances to the lowest-level appearance. Previous approaches for the task utilize classification networks to obtain rough discriminative parts as seed regions and use distance as a metric to cluster pixels of the same instances. Unlike previous approaches, we provide a novel self-supervised joint learning framework as the basic network and consider the clustering problem as calculating the probability that pixels belong to each instance. To this end, we propose our self-supervised joint learning two-stream network (SJLT Net) to finish this task. In the first stream, we leverage a joint learning framework to implement image-level supervised semantic segmentation with self-supervised saliency detection. In the second stream, we propose a Center Detection Network to detect different instances' centers with the gaussian loss function to cluster instances pixels. Besides, an integration module is utilized to combine information of both streams and get precise pseudo instances labels. Our approach generates pseudo instance segmentation labels of training images, which are used to train a fully supervised model. Our model achieves excellent performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, surpassing the best baseline trained with the same labels by 4.6\% AP^r_{50} on the train set and 2.6\% AP^r_{50} on the validation set.