This paper presents the first attempt to learn semantic boundary detection using image-level class labels as supervision. Our method starts by estimating coarse areas of object classes through attentions drawn by an image classification network. Since boundaries will locate somewhere between such areas of different classes, our task is formulated as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, where pixels on a line segment connecting areas of two different classes are regarded as a bag of boundary candidates. Moreover, we design a new neural network architecture that can learn to estimate semantic boundaries reliably even with uncertain supervision given by the MIL strategy. Our network is used to generate pseudo semantic boundary labels of training images, which are in turn used to train fully supervised models. The final model trained with our pseudo labels achieves an outstanding performance on the SBD dataset, where it is as competitive as some of previous arts trained with stronger supervision.

本文介绍了第一次尝试使用图像级别的类别标签作为监督来学习语义边界检测的方法，并且提出了一种基于多实例学习的任务形式，在区别不同类别的领域之间通过互相连线代表边界。我们提出的神经网络模型可以可靠地学习估计语义边界，即使是在多实例学习策略的不确定监督下，将其用于生成训练图像的伪语义边界标签，并使用这些标签来训练完全监督模型。最终模型在 SBD 数据集上取得了出色的表现，与一些使用更强监督的模型相当竞争。

利用图像级别的类别标签学习检测语义边界