# Transferable Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06828 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06828/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Semi-Supervised Wide-Angle Portraits Correction by Multi-Scale Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08024/) (2021)
- [Simpler Does It: Generating Semantic Labels with Objectness Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10335/) (2021)
- [Fully Automated Machine Learning Pipeline for Echocardiogram Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08440/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The performance of deep learning based semantic segmentation models heavily depends on sufficient data with careful annotations. However, even the largest public datasets only provide samples with pixel-level annotations for rather limited semantic categories. Such data scarcity critically limits scalability and applicability of semantic segmentation models in real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel transferable semi-supervised semantic segmentation model that can transfer the learned segmentation knowledge from a few strong categories with pixel-level annotations to unseen weak categories with only image-level annotations, significantly broadening the applicable territory of deep segmentation models. In particular, the proposed model consists of two complementary and learnable components: a Label transfer Network (L-Net) and a Prediction transfer Network (P-Net). The L-Net learns to transfer the segmentation knowledge from strong categories to the images in the weak categories and produces coarse pixel-level semantic maps, by effectively exploiting the similar appearance shared across categories. Meanwhile, the P-Net tailors the transferred knowledge through a carefully designed adversarial learning strategy and produces refined segmentation results with better details. Integrating the L-Net and P-Net achieves 96.5% and 89.4% performance of the fully-supervised baseline using 50% and 0% categories with pixel-level annotations respectively on PASCAL VOC 2012. With such a novel transfer mechanism, our proposed model is easily generalizable to a variety of new categories, only requiring image-level annotations, and offers appealing scalability in real applications.