2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDIVMSP-29.5
Paper Title NLKD: using coarse annotations for semantic segmentation based on knowledge distillation
Authors Dong Liang, Yun Du, College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China; Han Sun, Liyan Zhang, Ningzhong Liu, Mingqiang Wei, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
SessionIVMSP-29: Semantic Segmentation
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Friday, 11 June, 13:00 - 13:45
Presentation Time:Friday, 11 June, 13:00 - 13:45
Presentation Poster
Topic Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing: [IVARS] Image & Video Analysis, Synthesis, and Retrieval
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract Modern supervised learning relies on a large amount of training data, yet there are many noisy annotations in real datasets. For semantic segmentation tasks, pixel-level annotation noise is typically located at the edge of an object, while pixels within objects are fine-annotated. We argue the coarse annotations can provide instructive supervised information to guide model training rather than be discarded. This paper proposes a noise learning framework based on knowledge distillation NLKD, to improve segmentation performance on unclean data. It utilizes a teacher network to guide the student network that constitutes the knowledge distillation process. The teacher and student generate the pseudo-labels and jointly evaluate the quality of annotations to generate weights for each sample. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of NLKD, and we observe better performance with boundary-aware teacher networks and evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the proposed approach is model-independent and easy to implement, appropriate for integration with other tasks and models.