Weakly supervised segmentation via instance-aware propagation

Peak Response Map (PRM) highlighting the discriminative regions can be extracted from a pre-trained classification network. We can accurately localize instances of each class with the help of these response maps. However, these maps cannot provide reliable information for segmentation even with off-the-shelf object proposals. This is because neither PRM nor the proposals know which regions can be regarded as a complete instance. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing an Instance-aware Cue-propagation Network (ICN) with a new proposal-matching strategy. In particular, the ICN aims to filter out background distractions and cover the complete instance, while our proposed proposal-matching strategy adds a re-balancing constraint on the contributions of multi-scale object proposals. Extensive experiments conducted on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset show the superior performance of our method over weakly-supervised state-of-the-arts for both semantic and instance segmentation.