A Comprehensive Analysis of Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Different Image Domains
It addresses the problem of domain transferability for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation, which is incremental as it analyzes existing methods rather than proposing new ones.
This paper evaluated state-of-the-art weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods across natural scene, histopathology, and satellite image domains, finding that methods perform well on datasets they were developed for but poorly on others due to issues like ambiguous boundaries and class co-occurrence.
Recently proposed methods for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation have achieved impressive performance in predicting pixel classes despite being trained with only image labels which lack positional information. Because image annotations are cheaper and quicker to generate, weak supervision is more practical than full supervision for training segmentation algorithms. These methods have been predominantly developed to solve the background separation and partial segmentation problems presented by natural scene images and it is unclear whether they can be simply transferred to other domains with different characteristics, such as histopathology and satellite images, and still perform well. This paper evaluates state-of-the-art weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods on natural scene, histopathology, and satellite image datasets and analyzes how to determine which method is most suitable for a given dataset. Our experiments indicate that histopathology and satellite images present a different set of problems for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation than natural scene images, such as ambiguous boundaries and class co-occurrence. Methods perform well for datasets they were developed on, but tend to perform poorly on other datasets. We present some practical techniques for these methods on unseen datasets and argue that more work is needed for a generalizable approach to weakly-supervised semantic segmentation. Our full code implementation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/lyndonchan/wsss-analysis.