CARD: Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation via Class-agnostic Relation based Denoising

Recent semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods focus on mining extra supervision from unlabeled data by generating pseudo labels. However, noisy labels are inevitable in this process which prevent effective self-supervision. This paper proposes that noisy labels can be corrected based on semantic connections among features. Since a segmentation classifier produces both high and low-quality predictions, we can trace back to feature encoder to investigate how a feature in a noisy group is related to those in the confident groups. Discarding the weak predictions from the classifier, rectified predictions are assigned to the wrongly predicted features through the feature relations. The key to such an idea lies in mining reliable feature connections. With this goal, we propose a class-agnostic relation network to precisely capture semantic connections among features while ignoring their semantic categories. The feature relations enable us to perform effective noisy label corrections to boost self-training performance. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and Cityscapes demonstrate the state-of-the-art performances of the proposed methods under various semi-supervised settings.