Bias-Correction Feature Learner for Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation

Instance segmentation is heavily reliant on large-scale annotated datasets to yield an ideal accuracy. However, annotated data are difficult to collect. To expand the annotated data, a straightforward idea is to introduce semi-supervised learning, which uses a trained model to obtain initial proposals on unlabeled images and then use initial proposals to generate pseudo labels. However, existing methods inevitably introduce the bias for the model learning, i.e., the foreground in initial low-confident proposals (low-confident foreground) is arbitrarily assigned as background. This bias makes the foreground and background closer in the feature space, which degenerates the model accuracy. To address this issue, this paper discards incorrect supervision and designs a bias-correction feature learner. Specifically, on the one hand, low-confident foreground does not participate in supervised learning. On the other hand, we extract possible foreground regions from all initial proposals to construct high-quality positive pairs which depict objects of the same category in contrastive learning. Then, positive pairs are pulled closer in the feature space. This helps models extract closely clustered foreground features. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the public datasets (i.e., COCO, Cityscapes and Pascal VOC).