# Towards Closing the Gap in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation with DCNNs: Combining Local and Global Models Source: [Towards Closing the Gap in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation with DCNNs: Combining Local and Global Models]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:32:37.817Z Authors: Christoph Mayer, Radu Timofte, Gr\\'egory Paul Published: 2018-08-05T14:19:19.000Z ## Abstract Generating training sets for deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) is a bottleneck for modern real-world applications. This is a demanding task for applications where annotating training data is costly, such as in semantic segmentation. In the literature, there is still a gap between the performance achieved by a network trained on full and on weak annotations. In this paper, we establish a strategy to measure this gap and to identify the ingredients necessary to reduce it. On scribbles, we establish new state-of-the-art results: we obtain a mIoU of 75.6% without, and 75.7% with CRF post-processing. We reduce the gap by 64.2% whereas the current state-of-the-art reduces it only by 57.5%. Thanks to a systematic study of the different ingredients involved in the weakly supervised scenario and an original experimental strategy, we unravel a counter-intuitive mechanism that is simple and amenable to generalisations to other weakly-supervised scenarios: averaging poor local predicted annotations with the baseline ones and reuse them for training a DCNN yields new state-of-the-art results. ## 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. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()