Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation with Multi-Constraint Consistency Learning

Abstract: Consistency regularization has prevailed in semi-supervised semantic segmentation and achieved promising performance. However, existing methods typically concentrate on enhancing the Image-augmentation based Prediction consistency and optimizing the segmentation network as a whole, resulting in insufficient utilization of potential supervisory information. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Constraint Consistency Learning (MCCL) approach to facilitate the staged enhancement of the encoder and decoder. Specifically, we first design a feature knowledge alignment (FKA) strategy to promote the feature consistency learning of the encoder from image-augmentation. Our FKA encourages the encoder to derive consistent features for strongly and weakly augmented views from the perspectives of point-to-point alignment and prototype-based intra-class compactness. Moreover, we propose a self-adaptive intervention (SAI) module to increase the discrepancy of aligned intermediate feature representations, promoting Feature-perturbation based Prediction consistency learning. Self-adaptive feature masking and noise injection are designed in an instance-specific manner to perturb the features for robust learning of the decoder. Experimental results on Pascal VOC2012 and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our proposed MCCL achieves new state-of-the-art performance. The source code and models are made available at https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/MCCL.