CFCG: Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Cross-Fusion and Contour Guidance Supervision

Current state-of-the-art semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS) methods typically adopt pseudo labeling and consistency regularization between multiple learners with different perturbations. Although the performance is desirable, many issues remain: (1) supervisions from a single learner tend to be noisy which causes unreliable consistency regularization (2) existing pixel-wise confidence-score-based reliability measurement causes potential error accumulation as the training proceeds. In this paper, we propose a novel SSSS framework, called CFCG, which combines cross-fusion and contour guidance supervision to tackle these issues. Concretely, we adopt both image-level and feature-level perturbations to expand feature distribution thus pushing the potential limits of consistency regularization. Then, two particular modules are proposed to enable effective semi-supervised learning under heavy coherent perturbations. Firstly, Cross-Fusion Supervision (CFS) mechanism leverages multiple learners to enhance the quality of pseudo labels. Secondly, we introduce an adaptive contour guidance module (ACGM) to effectively identify unreliable spatial regions in pseudo labels. Finally, our proposed CFCG achieves gains of mIoU +1.40%, +0.89% with a single learner and +1.85%, +1.33% by fusion inference on PASCAL VOC 2012 and on Cityscapes respectively under 1/8 protocols, clearly surpassing previous methods and reaching the state-of-the-art.