Hybrid supervised instance segmentation by learning label noise suppression

To reach top accuracy, current fully supervised instance segmentation methods severely rely on large-scale pixel-wise labeled datasets. They are usually expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Though weakly or semi-supervised methods utilize cheap bounding box labeled, image-level labeled or unlabeled samples to save the labeling cost, their performance is largely sacrificed. To save labeling cost without losing much performance, in this paper, we present a pipeline that can utilize economical bounding box labels and accurate pixel-wise labels in a hybrid way. Specifically, we design two ancillary models to learn label noise suppression and obtain accurate pseudo pixel-wise labels from bounding box labels for training. One is designed to suppress mislabeling between foreground and background, and the other is designed to suppress noise from mislabeling of instances. Moreover, we exploit category-aware spatial attention module, category constraint module, instance constraint module, and self-learning training approach to improve the accuracy of pseudo labels. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and the Cityscapes datasets show that our method can achieve competitive performance with much less labeling cost.