Minimizing Supervision for Free-space Segmentation
This work addresses the need for efficient adaptation of autonomous driving systems to various vehicles and environments by reducing annotation costs.
The paper tackled the problem of costly pixelwise annotations for free-space segmentation in autonomous navigation by developing a framework that uses minimal human supervision, achieving better performance than other weakly supervised methods.
Identifying "free-space," or safely driveable regions in the scene ahead, is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation. While this task can be addressed using semantic segmentation, the manual labor involved in creating pixelwise annotations to train the segmentation model is very costly. Although weakly supervised segmentation addresses this issue, most methods are not designed for free-space. In this paper, we observe that homogeneous texture and location are two key characteristics of free-space, and develop a novel, practical framework for free-space segmentation with minimal human supervision. Our experiments show that our framework performs better than other weakly supervised methods while using less supervision. Our work demonstrates the potential for performing free-space segmentation without tedious and costly manual annotation, which will be important for adapting autonomous driving systems to different types of vehicles and environments