Papers › Fine-grained Background Representation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Fine-grained Background Representation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Xu Yin, Woobin Im, Dongbo Min, Yuchi Huo, Fei Pan, Sung-Eui Yoon
Generating reliable pseudo masks from image-level labels is challenging in the weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) task due to the lack of spatial information. Prevalent class activation map (CAM)-based solutions are challenged to discriminate the foreground (FG) objects from the suspicious background (BG) pixels (a.k.a. co-occurring) and learn the integral object regions. This paper proposes a simple fine-grained background representation (FBR) method to discover and represent diverse BG semantics and address the co-occurring problems. We abandon using the class prototype or pixel-level features for BG representation. Instead, we develop a novel primitive, negative region of interest (NROI), to capture the fine-grained BG semantic information and conduct the pixel-to-NROI contrast to distinguish the confusing BG pixels. We also present an active sampling strategy to mine the FG negatives on-the-fly, enabling efficient pixel-to-pixel intra-foreground contrastive learning to activate the entire object region. Thanks to the simplicity of design and convenience in use, our proposed method can be seamlessly plugged into various models, yielding new state-of-the-art results under various WSSS settings across benchmarks. Leveraging solely image-level (I) labels as supervision, our method achieves 73.2 mIoU and 45.6 mIoU segmentation results on Pascal Voc and MS COCO test sets, respectively. Furthermore, by incorporating saliency maps as an additional supervision signal (I+S), we attain 74.9 mIoU on Pascal Voc test set. Concurrently, our FBR approach demonstrates meaningful performance gains in weakly-supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) tasks, showcasing its robustness and strong generalization capabilities across diverse domains.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation | COCO 2014 val | FBR | mIoU | 45.6 | #12 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation | PASCAL VOC 2012 test | FBR | Mean IoU | 74.9 | #9 of 60 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation | PASCAL VOC 2012 train | FBR | Mean IoU | 75.9 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation | PASCAL VOC 2012 val | FBR | Mean IoU | 74.2 | #12 of 73 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections