# Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 198 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 198)

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- [Multi-class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02891/) (2022)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [TS-CAM: Token Semantic Coupled Attention Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14862/) (2021)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [Large-scale Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03149/) (2021)
- [Non-Salient Region Object Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14581/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Image-specific Prototype Exploration for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02909/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07110/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Tasks with Affinity Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11787/) (2021)
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- [Cross Language Image Matching for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02668/) (2022)
- [Context Decoupling Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01795/) (2021)
- [Scribble-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08537/) (2022)
- [Reducing Information Bottleneck for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06530/) (2021)
- [Regional Semantic Contrast and Aggregation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09653/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Early-Learning Correction for Segmentation from Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03740/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation using Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03860/) (2022)
- [L2G: A Simple Local-to-Global Knowledge Transfer Framework for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03206/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation with Self-supervised Object-centric Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05027/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) Enhanced Pseudo Labels for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05803/) (2023)
- [Pseudo-mask Matters in Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12995/) (2021)
- [ZeroWaste Dataset: Towards Deformable Object Segmentation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02740/) (2021)
- [Unveiling the Potential of Structure Preserving for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04523/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Label-efficient Deep Image Segmentation: Bridging the Gap between Weak Supervision and Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01223/) (2022)
- [Universal Weakly Supervised Segmentation by Pixel-to-Segment Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00957/) (2021)
- [Background-Aware Pooling and Noise-Aware Loss for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00905/) (2021)
- [Max Pooling with Vision Transformers reconciles class and shape in weakly supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17400/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a new loss function for the weakly-supervised training of semantic image segmentation models based on three guiding principles: to seed with weak localization cues, to expand objects based on the information about which classes can occur in an image, and to constrain the segmentations to coincide with object boundaries. We show experimentally that training a deep convolutional neural network using the proposed loss function leads to substantially better segmentations than previous state-of-the-art methods on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset. We furthermore give insight into the working mechanism of our method by a detailed experimental study that illustrates how the segmentation quality is affected by each term of the proposed loss function as well as their combinations.