Enhanced Soft Label for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

As a mainstream framework in the field of semi-supervised learning (SSL), self-training via pseudo labeling and its variants have witnessed impressive progress in semi-supervised semantic segmentation with the recent advance of deep neural networks. However, modern self-training based SSL algorithms use a pre-defined constant threshold to select unlabeled pixel samples that contribute to the training, thus failing to be compatible with different learning difficulties of variant categories and different learning status of the model. To address these issues, we propose Enhanced Soft Label (ESL), a curriculum learning approach to fully leverage the high-value supervisory signals implicit in the untrustworthy pseudo label. ESL believes that pixels with unconfident predictions can be pretty sure about their belonging to a subset of dominant classes though being arduous to determine the exact one. It thus contains a Dynamic Soft Label (DSL) module to dynamically maintain the high probability classes, keeping the label "soft" so as to make full use of the high entropy prediction. However, the DSL itself will inevitably introduce ambiguity between dominant classes, thus blurring the classification boundary. Therefore, we further propose a pixel-to-part contrastive learning method cooperated with an unsupervised object part grouping mechanism to improve its ability to distinguish between different classes. Extensive experimental results on Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes show that our approach achieves remarkable improvements over existing state-of-the-art approaches.