# Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Based on Web Image Co-segmentation

Source: [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Based on Web Image Co-segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa638c1e209131ce9ff7a0>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T20:44:17.219Z

Authors: Tong Shen, Guosheng Lin, Lingqiao Liu, Chunhua Shen, Ian Reid

Published: 2017-05-25T05:35:41.000Z

## Abstract

Training a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) for semantic segmentation requires a large number of masks with pixel level labelling, which involves a large amount of human labour and time for annotation. In contrast, web images and their image-level labels are much easier and cheaper to obtain. In this work, we propose a novel method for weakly supervised semantic segmentation with only image-level labels. The method utilizes the internet to retrieve a large number of images and uses a large scale co-segmentation framework to generate masks for the retrieved images. We first retrieve images from search engines, e.g. Flickr and Google, using semantic class names as queries, e.g. class names in the dataset PASCAL VOC 2012. We then use high quality masks produced by co-segmentation on the retrieved images as well as the target dataset images with image level labels to train segmentation networks. We obtain an IoU score of 56.9 on test set of PASCAL VOC 2012, which reaches the state-of-the-art performance.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation on PASCAL VOC 2012 (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/weakly-supervised-semantic-segmentation-on-pascal-voc-2012-test.md>): Weakly supervised semantic segmentation; PASCAL VOC 2012 (test); mIoU: 56.9.

- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation on PASCAL VOC 2012 (val)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/weakly-supervised-semantic-segmentation-on-pascal-voc-2012-val.md>): Weakly supervised semantic segmentation; PASCAL VOC 2012 (val); mIoU: 56.4.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.09052>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.09052.pdf>)