Hypergraph Convolutional Networks for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental topic in computer vision. Several deep learning methods have been proposed for semantic segmentation with outstanding results. However, these models require a lot of densely annotated images. To address this problem, we propose a new algorithm that uses HyperGraph Convolutional Networks for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation (HyperGCN-WSS). Our algorithm constructs spatial and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) graphs from the images in the dataset to generate the hypergraphs. Then, we train a specialized HyperGraph Convolutional Network (HyperGCN) architecture using some weak signals. The outputs of the HyperGCN are denominated pseudo-labels, which are later used to train a DeepLab model for semantic segmentation. HyperGCN-WSS is evaluated on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset for semantic segmentation, using scribbles or clicks as weak signals. Our algorithm shows competitive performance against previous methods.

Jhony H. Giraldo, Vincenzo Scarrica, Antonino Staiano, Francesco Camastra, Thierry Bouwmans · 2022