Methods that move towards less supervised scenarios are key for image segmentation, as dense labels demand significant human intervention. Generally, the annotation burden is mitigated by labeling datasets with weaker forms of supervision, e.g. image-level labels or bounding boxes. Another option are semi-supervised settings, that commonly leverage a few strong annotations and a huge number of unlabeled/weakly-labeled data. In this paper, we revisit semi-supervised segmentation schemes and narrow down significantly the annotation budget (in terms of total labeling time of the training set) compared to previous approaches. With a very simple pipeline, we demonstrate that at low annotation budgets, semi-supervised methods outperform by a wide margin weakly-supervised ones for both semantic and instance segmentation. Our approach also outperforms previous semi-supervised works at a much reduced labeling cost. We present results for the Pascal VOC benchmark and unify weakly and semi-supervised approaches by considering the total annotation budget, thus allowing a fairer comparison between methods.

本文研究了半监督分割方法，与之前的方法相比，本文的方法在标注预算方面有了重大突破，在使用低标注预算时，我们的方法在语义与实例分割方面表现优于弱监督方法，并在较小的标注成本下优于以往的半监督方法。同时，我们通过考虑总的标注预算，将弱监督和半监督方法结合在一起，从而更公正地比较各种方法。我们在 Pascal VOC 基准测试上展示了结果。

预算感知半监督语义与实例分割