# ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05144 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/

## Key facts

- Cited by 331 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 331)

- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)
- [InstanceDiffusion: Instance-level Control for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03290/) (2024)
- [Reviving Iterative Training with Mask Guidance for Interactive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06583/) (2021)
- [DiffuMask: Synthesizing Images with Pixel-level Annotations for Semantic Segmentation Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11681/) (2023)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [DatasetDM: Synthesizing Data with Perception Annotations Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06160/) (2023)
- [Learning What Not to Segment: A New Perspective on Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07615/) (2022)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [CLIP is Also an Efficient Segmenter: A Text-Driven Approach for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09506/) (2022)
- [ReCo: Retrieve and Co-segment for Zero-shot Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07045/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation with Directional Context-aware Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14133/) (2021)
- [Pixel Contrastive-Consistent Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09025/) (2021)
- [BigDatasetGAN: Synthesizing ImageNet with Pixel-wise Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04684/) (2022)
- [Non-Salient Region Object Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14581/) (2021)
- [One Thing One Click: A Self-Training Approach for Weakly Supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02246/) (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)
- [Pointly-Supervised Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06404/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Tasks with Affinity Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11787/) (2021)
- [Review of Large Vision Models and Visual Prompt Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00855/) (2023)
- [Complementary Patch for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03852/) (2021)
- [Class Re-Activation Maps for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00962/) (2022)
- [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)
- [CycleMix: A Holistic Strategy for Medical Image Segmentation from Scribble Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01475/) (2022)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dual-Branch Network and Dynamically Mixed Pseudo Labels Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02106/) (2022)
- [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)
- [DiscoBox: Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation and Semantic Correspondence from Box Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06464/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale data is of crucial importance for learning semantic segmentation models, but annotating per-pixel masks is a tedious and inefficient procedure. We note that for the topic of interactive image segmentation, scribbles are very widely used in academic research and commercial software, and are recognized as one of the most user-friendly ways of interacting. In this paper, we propose to use scribbles to annotate images, and develop an algorithm to train convolutional networks for semantic segmentation supervised by scribbles. Our algorithm is based on a graphical model that jointly propagates information from scribbles to unmarked pixels and learns network parameters. We present competitive object semantic segmentation results on the PASCAL VOC dataset by using scribbles as annotations. Scribbles are also favored for annotating stuff (e.g., water, sky, grass) that has no well-defined shape, and our method shows excellent results on the PASCAL-CONTEXT dataset thanks to extra inexpensive scribble annotations. Our scribble annotations on PASCAL VOC are available at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/jifdai/downloads/scribble_sup