Semi-Supervised Video Salient Object Detection Based on Uncertainty-Guided Pseudo Labels

Semi-Supervised Video Salient Object Detection (SS-VSOD) is challenging because of the lack of temporal information caused by sparse annotations in video sequences. Most works address this problem by generating pseudo labels for unlabeled data. However, error-prone pseudo labels negatively affect the VOSD model. Therefore, a deeper insight into pseudo labels should be developed. In this work, we aim to explore 1) how to utilize the incorrect predictions in pseudo labels to guide the network to generate more robust pseudo labels and 2) how to further screen out the noise that still exists in the improved pseudo labels. To this end, we propose an Uncertainty-Guided Pseudo Label Generator (UGPLG), which makes full use of inter-frame information to ensure the temporal consistency of the pseudo-labels and improves the robustness of the pseudo labels by strengthening the learning of difficult scenarios. Furthermore, we also introduce adversarial learning to address the noise problems in pseudo labels, guaranteeing the positive guidance of pseudo labels during model training. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods outperform existing semi-supervised method and partial fully-supervised methods across five public benchmarks of DAVIS, FBMS, MCL, ViSal, and SegTrack-V2.