Weakly Supervised Learning of Semantic Correspondence through Cascaded Online Correspondence Refinement

In this paper, we develop a weakly supervised learning algorithm to learn robust semantic correspondences from large-scale datasets with only image-level labels. Following the spirit of multiple instance learning (MIL), we decompose the weakly supervised correspondence learning problem into three stages: image-level matching, region-level matching, and pixel-level matching. We propose a novel cascaded online correspondence refinement algorithm to integrate MIL and the correspondence filtering and refinement procedure into a single deep network and train this network end-to-end with only image-level supervision, i.e., without point-to-point matching information. During the correspondence learning process, pixel-to-pixel matching pairs inferred from weak supervision are propagated, filtered, and enhanced through masked correspondence voting and calibration. Besides, we design a correspondence consistency check algorithm to select images with discriminative key points to generate pseudo-labels for classical matching algorithms. Finally, we filter out about 110,000 images from the ImageNet ILSVRC training set to formulate a new dataset, called SC-ImageNet. Experiments on several popular benchmarks indicate that pre-training on SC-ImageNet can improve the performance of state-ofthe-art algorithms efficiently. Our project is available on https://github.com/21210240056/SC-ImageNet .