Scribble-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Random Walk on Neural Representation and Self-Supervision on Neural Eigenspace

Abstract: Scribble-supervised semantic segmentation has gained much attention recently for its promising performance without high-quality annotations. Many approaches have been proposed. Typically, they handle this problem to either introduce a well-labeled dataset from another related task, turn to iterative refinement and post-processing with the graphical model, or manipulate the scribble label. This work aims to achieve semantic segmentation supervised by scribble label directly without auxiliary information and other intermediate manipulation. Specifically, we impose diffusion on neural representation by random walk and consistency on neural eigenspace by self-supervision, which forces the neural network to produce dense and consistent predictions over the whole dataset. The random walk embedded in the network will compute a probabilistic transition matrix, with which the neural representation diffused to be uniform. Moreover, given the probabilistic transition matrix, we apply the self-supervision on its eigenspace for consistency in the image's main parts. In addition to comparing the common scribble dataset, we also conduct experiments on the modified datasets that randomly shrink and even drop the scribbles on image objects. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method and are even comparable to some full-label supervised ones. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/panzhiyi/RW-SS.