DHR: Dual Features-Driven Hierarchical Rebalancing in Inter- and Intra-Class Regions for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSS) ensures high-quality segmentation with limited data and excels when employed as input seed masks for large-scale vision models such as Segment Anything. However, WSS faces challenges related to minor classes since those are overlooked in images with adjacent multiple classes, a limitation originating from the overfitting of traditional expansion methods like Random Walk. We first address this by employing unsupervised and weakly-supervised feature maps instead of conventional methodologies, allowing for hierarchical mask enhancement. This method distinctly categorizes higher-level classes and subsequently separates their associated lower-level classes, ensuring all classes are correctly restored in the mask without losing minor ones. Our approach, validated through extensive experimentation, significantly improves WSS across five benchmarks (VOC: 79.8%, COCO: 53.9%, Context: 49.0%, ADE: 32.9%, Stuff: 37.4%), reducing the gap with fully supervised methods by over 84% on the VOC validation set. Code is available at https://github. com/shjo-april/DHR.