English

What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2016-07-26 v5

Abstract

The semantic image segmentation task presents a trade-off between test time accuracy and training-time annotation cost. Detailed per-pixel annotations enable training accurate models but are very time-consuming to obtain, image-level class labels are an order of magnitude cheaper but result in less accurate models. We take a natural step from image-level annotation towards stronger supervision: we ask annotators to point to an object if one exists. We incorporate this point supervision along with a novel objectness potential in the training loss function of a CNN model. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmark reveal that the combined effect of point-level supervision and objectness potential yields an improvement of 12.9% mIOU over image-level supervision. Further, we demonstrate that models trained with point-level supervision are more accurate than models trained with image-level, squiggle-level or full supervision given a fixed annotation budget.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.02106,
  title  = {What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision},
  author = {Amy Bearman and Olga Russakovsky and Vittorio Ferrari and Li Fei-Fei},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.02106},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

ECCV (2016) submission

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:48:23.243Z