Weakly-supervised Incremental learning for Semantic segmentation with Class Hierarchy

Abstract

Although current semantic segmentation approaches have achieved impressive performance, their ability to incrementally learn new classes is limited. Moreover, pixel-by-pixel annotations are costly and time-consuming. Therefore, a new field called Weakly-supervised Incremental Learning for Semantic Segmentation (WILSS) has emerged, which learns new classes using image-level labels. However, image-level labels do not provide sufficient detail, and we discover that the state-of-the-art of WILSS suffers from confusion between old knowledge and new knowledge. To address this issue, we propose Weakly-supervised Incremental learning for Semantic segmentation with Class Hierarchy (WISH), a method that considers the hierarchical structure of each class when determining which knowledge to trust in cases of confusion between old and new knowledge. Our method has achieved new state-of-the-art performances in all settings compared to the previous methods on the Pascal VOC and MS COCO datasets.