SEMI-SUPERVISED FEW-SHOT SEGMENTATION WITH NOISY SUPPORT IMAGES

Motivated by the semi-supervised learning that uses the unlabeled data and pseudo annotations to improve the image classification, this paper proposes a new semi-supervised few-shot segmentation (FSS) framework of which the training process uses not only the annotated images, but also the unlabeled images, e.g. images from other available datasets, to enhance the training of the FSS model. Furthermore, in the test phase, more support images and pseudo-annotations can also be generated by the proposed framework to enrich the support set of novel classes and therefore benefit the inference. However, unlabeled images are not a free lunch. The noisy intra-class samples and inter-class samples existed in the unlabeled images as well as the interferences of the bad quality of pseudo annotations make it difficult to utilize the correct images and pseudo annotations for a certain class. To this end, we further propose a ranking algorithm consisting of an inter-class confidence term and an intra-class confidence term to efficiently utilize the pseudo annotations of the class with high quality. Extensive experiments on COCO-20i dataset demonstrate that the proposed semi-supervised FSS framework is superior to many state-of-the-art methods.