WAILS: Watershed Algorithm With Image-Level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

Image semantic segmentation has great development in many fields, and the lack of fully supervised segmentation labels has always been a major problem in the development of image semantic segmentation. In this paper, we propose a WAILS method to solve this problem. First, the image is coarsely segmented through a weakly supervised network at the image level. Second, to further obtain the shape of the target in the image, the watershed algorithm is used to refine the result of the coarse segmentation. Third, this refined image is used as a label for the first round of training of a fully supervised image semantic segmentation network. At last, the results are refined through the watershed as the label of the second round of fully supervised training and then it iterates. This method achieves the pixel-level semantic segmentation only through image-level labels and watershed pre-segmentation. Our method achieved good performance on the PASCAL 2012 dataset and the COCO dataset, while its segmentation accuracy surpasses all current weakly supervised semantic segmentation models in the category of bird, airplane, sheep, and so on.