# Semantic Segmentation by Semantic Proportions Source: [Semantic Segmentation by Semantic Proportions]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T03:39:44.122Z Authors: Halil Ibrahim Aysel, Xiaohao Cai, Adam Pr\\"ugel-Bennett Published: 2023-05-24T22:51:52.000Z ## Abstract Semantic segmentation is a critical task in computer vision aiming to identify and classify individual pixels in an image, with numerous applications in for example autonomous driving and medical image analysis. However, semantic segmentation can be highly challenging particularly due to the need for large amounts of annotated data. Annotating images is a time-consuming and costly process, often requiring expert knowledge and significant effort; moreover, saving the annotated images could dramatically increase the storage space. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for semantic segmentation, requiring the rough information of individual semantic class proportions, shortened as semantic proportions, rather than the necessity of ground-truth segmentation maps. This greatly simplifies the data annotation process and thus will significantly reduce the annotation time, cost and storage space, opening up new possibilities for semantic segmentation tasks where obtaining the full ground-truth segmentation maps may not be feasible or practical. Our proposed method of utilising semantic proportions can (i) further be utilised as a booster in the presence of ground-truth segmentation maps to gain performance without extra data and model complexity, and (ii) also be seen as a parameter-free plug-and-play module, which can be attached to existing deep neural networks designed for semantic segmentation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the good performance of our method compared to benchmark methods that rely on ground-truth segmentation maps. Utilising semantic proportions suggested in this work offers a promising direction for future semantic segmentation research. ## 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]()