Parallel Detection-and-Segmentation Learning for Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation

Weakly supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) with only image-level labels has recently drawn much attention. To date, bottom-up WSIS methods refine discriminative cues from classifiers with sophisticated multi-stage training procedures, which also suffer from inconsistent object boundaries. And top-down WSIS methods are formulated as cascade detection-to-segmentation pipeline, in which the quality of segmentation learning heavily depends on pseudo masks generated from detectors. In this paper, we propose a unified parallel detection-and-segmentation learning (PDSL) framework to learn instance segmentation with only image-level labels, which draws inspiration from both top-down and bottom-up instance segmentation approaches. The detection module is the same as the typical design of any weakly supervised object detection, while the segmentation module leverages self-supervised learning to model class-agnostic foreground extraction, following by self-training to refine class-specific segmentation. We further design instance-activation correlation module to improve the coherence between detection and segmentation branches. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed method outperforms baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art results on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO.