Structured Consistency Loss for semi-supervised semantic segmentation

Abstract: The consistency loss has played a key role in solving problems in recent studies on semi-supervised learning. Yet extant studies with the consistency loss are limited to its application to classification tasks; extant studies on semi-supervised semantic segmentation rely on pixel-wise classification, which does not reflect the structured nature of characteristics in prediction. We propose a structured consistency loss to address this limitation of extant studies. Structured consistency loss promotes consistency in inter-pixel similarity between teacher and student networks. Specifically, collaboration with CutMix optimizes the efficient performance of semi-supervised semantic segmentation with structured consistency loss by reducing computational burden dramatically. The superiority of proposed method is verified with the Cityscapes; The Cityscapes benchmark results with validation and with test data are 81.9 mIoU and 83.84 mIoU respectively. This ranks the first place on the pixel-level semantic labeling task of Cityscapes benchmark suite. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present the superiority of state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning in semantic segmentation.