Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Based on Semantic Texton Forest and Saliency Prior

Most previous weakly supervised semantic segmentation works utilize the labels of the whole training set and thereby need the construction of a relationship graph about image labels. This method lack of structure information in single image and suffer from enormous quantity parameters which result in expensive computation. In this study, a weakly-supervised semantic segmentation algorithm is proposed. Under Conditional Random Field (CRF) framework, an novel energy function expression is developed based on saliency priors as structure context relationship, which avoids the construction of a huge graph in whole training dataset. Specifically, a nonparametric random Semantic Texton Forest (STF) is obtained using weakly supervised training data and images saliency. Then STF feature is extracted from image superpixels and probability estimates of superpixels label is calculated by naive Bayesian method. Finally, a CRF based optimization algorithm is proposed which can efficiency solved by alpha expansion algorithm. Experiments on the MSRC-21 dataset show that the new algorithm outperforms some previous influential weakly-supervised segmentation algorithms with no building graph in whole training set.