ConsInstancy: Learning Instance Representations for Semi-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation of Concrete Aggregate Particles
This is an incremental improvement for domain-specific applications in materials science, specifically for analyzing concrete particles.
The paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised panoptic segmentation for concrete aggregate particles by introducing ConsInstancy regularization and novel instance representations, resulting in a 5% increase in overall accuracy compared to supervised training and a 1.5% improvement over state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods.
We present a semi-supervised method for panoptic segmentation based on ConsInstancy regularisation, a novel strategy for semi-supervised learning. It leverages completely unlabelled data by enforcing consistency between predicted instance representations and semantic segmentations during training in order to improve the segmentation performance. To this end, we also propose new types of instance representations that can be predicted by one simple forward path through a fully convolutional network (FCN), delivering a convenient and simple-to-train framework for panoptic segmentation. More specifically, we propose the prediction of a three-dimensional instance orientation map as intermediate representation and two complementary distance transform maps as final representation, providing unique instance representations for a panoptic segmentation. We test our method on two challenging data sets of both, hardened and fresh concrete, the latter being proposed by the authors in this paper demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming the results achieved by state-of-the-art methods for semi-supervised segmentation. In particular, we are able to show that by leveraging completely unlabeled data in our semi-supervised approach the achieved overall accuracy (OA) is increased by up to 5% compared to an entirely supervised training using only labeled data. Furthermore, we exceed the OA achieved by state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods by up to 1.5%.