Cited by 604Advanced Neural Network ApplicationsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningMedical Image Segmentation Techniques

Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation

Open access
Wang, Wenguan, Zhou, Tianfei, Yu, Fisher, Dai, Jifeng, Konukoglu, Ender, Gool, Luc Van·2021·2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

Abstract

Current semantic segmentation methods focus only on mining "local" context, i.e., dependencies between pixels within individual images, by context-aggregation modules (e.g., dilated convolution, neural attention) or structure-aware optimization criteria (e.g., IoU-like loss). However, they ignore "global" context of the training data, i.e., rich semantic relations between pixels across different images. Inspired by recent advance in unsupervised contrastive representation learning, we propose a pixel-wise contrastive algorithm for semantic segmentation in the fully supervised setting. The core idea is to enforce pixel embeddings belonging to a same semantic class to be more similar than embeddings from different classes. It raises a pixel-wise metric learning paradigm for semantic segmentation, by explicitly exploring the structures of labeled pixels, which were rarely explored before. Our method can be effortlessly incorporated into existing segmentation frameworks without extra overhead during testing. We experimentally show that, with famous segmentation models (i.e., DeepLabV3, HRNet, OCR) and backbones (i.e., ResNet, HRNet), our method brings performance improvements across diverse datasets (i.e., Cityscapes, PASCAL-Context, COCO-Stuff, CamVid). We expect this work will encourage our community to rethink the current de facto training paradigm in semantic segmentation.

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Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/iccv48922.2021.00721

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95 of 95 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • SCL can eliminate task-independent information by constructing positive data pairs.

    “Secondly, SCL can eliminate the task-independent information by constructing positive data pairs.”

    From Dual Contrastive Learning for General Face Forgery Detection (2022) · cites this paper as Wang et al. 2021

  • Hard negative pair selection is crucial for contrastive learning.

    “Robinson et al. (2021); Wang et al. (2021) found that the hard negative pair selection is crucial for contrastive learning.”

    From Dual Contrastive Learning for General Face Forgery Detection (2022) · cites this paper as Wang et al. (2021)

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Authors
Wang, W., Zhou, T., Yu, F., Dai, J., Konukoglu, E., & Gool, L. V.
Affiliations
  • ETH Zurich (CH)
  • Sensetime (China) (CN)
  • ETH Zurich,Computer Vision Lab
Venue
2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2021-10
Pages
7283-7293
OpenAlex
W3122412340
Cited by
604
References
99
Citations by year
2026: 48 · 2025: 85 · 2024: 145 · 2023: 182 · 2022: 110 · 2021: 34
FWCI
38.51
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (publishedVersion)
  • Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) (acceptedVersion, other-oa)
  • Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • ETH Zürich Research Collection
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
Keywords
semantic segmentation, unsupervised contrastive learning, metric learning, global context, pixel embedding, training paradigms

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