# Boxes2Pixels: Learning Defect Segmentation from Noisy SAM Masks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11162/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03683/) (2016)
- [Uncertainty-aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07034/) (2019)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [WinCLIP: Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14814/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Fast Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12156/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [BoxInst: High-Performance Instance Segmentation with Box Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02310/) (2020)
- [Learning From Noisy Labels By Regularized Estimation Of Annotator Confusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03680/) (2019)
- [Selective-Supervised Contrastive Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04181/) (2022)
- [DiscoBox: Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation and Semantic Correspondence from Box Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06464/) (2021)
- [Asymmetric Loss Functions and Deep Densely Connected Networks for Highly Imbalanced Medical Image Segmentation: Application to Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11078/) (2018)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Image-Level Labels: from Traditional Models to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13026/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate defect segmentation is critical for industrial inspection, yet dense pixel-level annotations are rarely available. A common workaround is to convert inexpensive bounding boxes into pseudo-masks using foundation segmentation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, these pseudo-labels are systematically noisy on industrial surfaces, often hallucinating background structure while missing sparse defects. To address this limitation, a noise-robust box-to-pixel distillation framework, Boxes2Pixels, is proposed that treats SAM as a noisy teacher rather than a source of ground-truth supervision. Bounding boxes are converted into pseudo-masks offline by SAM, and a compact student is trained with (i) a hierarchical decoder over frozen DINOv2 features for semantic stability, (ii) an auxiliary binary localization head to decouple sparse foreground discovery from class prediction, and (iii) a one-sided online self-correction mechanism that relaxes background supervision when the student is confident, targeting teacher false negatives. On a manually annotated wind turbine inspection benchmark, the proposed Boxes2Pixels improves anomaly mIoU by +6.97 and binary IoU by +9.71 over the strongest baseline trained under identical weak supervision. Moreover, online self-correction increases the binary recall by +18.56, while the model employs 80% fewer trainable parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/CLendering/Boxes2Pixels.