Instance Segmentation by Semi-Supervised Learning and Image Synthesis

• Published in: IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems Vol. E103.D; no. 6; pp. 1247 - 1256
• Main Authors: OBA, Takeru, UKITA, Norimichi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tokyo The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers 01.06.2020; Japan Science and Technology Agency
• Subjects: 3D CG models; Annotations; Computer simulation; Image annotation; Image detection; Image segmentation; image synthesis; Instance segmentation; Object recognition; Semi-supervised learning; Synthesis; Three dimensional models; Training
• ISSN: 0916-8532; 1745-1361
• DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2019MVP0016

This paper proposes a method to create various training images for instance segmentation in a semi-supervised manner. In our proposed learning scheme, a few 3D CG models of target objects and a large number of images retrieved by keywords from the Internet are employed for initial model training and model update, respectively. Instance segmentation requires pixel-level annotations as well as object class labels in all training images. A possible solution to reduce a huge annotation cost is to use synthesized images as training images. While image synthesis using a 3D CG simulator can generate the annotations automatically, it is difficult to prepare a variety of 3D object models for the simulator. One more possible solution is semi-supervised learning. Semi-supervised learning such as self-training uses a small set of supervised data and a huge number of unsupervised data. The supervised images are given by the 3D CG simulator in our method. From the unsupervised images, we have to select only correctly-detected annotations. For selecting the correctly-detected annotations, we propose to quantify the reliability of each detected annotation based on its silhouette as well as its textures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can generate more various images for improving instance segmentation.