BoundMatch: Boundary detection applied to semi-supervised segmentation for urban-driving scenes (2503.23519v1)

Abstract: Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SS-SS) aims to mitigate the heavy annotation burden of dense pixel labeling by leveraging abundant unlabeled images alongside a small labeled set. While current teacher-student consistency regularization methods achieve strong results, they often overlook a critical challenge: the precise delineation of object boundaries. In this paper, we propose BoundMatch, a novel multi-task SS-SS framework that explicitly integrates semantic boundary detection into the consistency regularization pipeline. Our core mechanism, Boundary Consistency Regularized Multi-Task Learning (BCRM), enforces prediction agreement between teacher and student models on both segmentation masks and detailed semantic boundaries. To further enhance performance and sharpen contours, BoundMatch incorporates two lightweight fusion modules: Boundary-Semantic Fusion (BSF) injects learned boundary cues into the segmentation decoder, while Spatial Gradient Fusion (SGF) refines boundary predictions using mask gradients, leading to higher-quality boundary pseudo-labels. This framework is built upon SAMTH, a strong teacher-student baseline featuring a Harmonious Batch Normalization (HBN) update strategy for improved stability. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets including Cityscapes, BDD100K, SYNTHIA, ADE20K, and Pascal VOC show that BoundMatch achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods while significantly improving boundary-specific evaluation metrics. We also demonstrate its effectiveness in realistic large-scale unlabeled data scenarios and on lightweight architectures designed for mobile deployment.