Weakly supervised visual recognition using inexact supervision is a critical yet challenging learning problem. It significantly reduces human labeling costs and traditionally relies on multi-instance learning and pseudo-labeling. This paper introduces WeakSAM and solves the weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) and segmentation by utilizing the pre-learned world knowledge contained in a vision foundation model, i.e., the Segment Anything Model (SAM). WeakSAM addresses two critical limitations in traditional WSOD retraining, i.e., pseudo ground truth (PGT) incompleteness and noisy PGT instances, through adaptive PGT generation and Region of Interest (RoI) drop regularization. It also addresses the SAM's problems of requiring prompts and category unawareness for automatic object detection and segmentation. Our results indicate that WeakSAM significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in WSOD and WSIS benchmarks with large margins, i.e. average improvements of 7.4% and 8.5%, respectively. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/hustvl/WeakSAM}.
Weakly-supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) has been considered as a more challenging task than weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Compared to WSSS, WSIS requires instance-wise localization, which is difficult to extract from image-level labels. To tackle the problem, most WSIS approaches use off-the-shelf proposal techniques that require pre-training with instance or object level labels, deviating the fundamental definition of the fully-image-level supervised setting. In this paper, we propose a novel approach including two innovative components. First, we propose a semantic knowledge transfer to obtain pseudo instance labels by transferring the knowledge of WSSS to WSIS while eliminating the need for the off-the-shelf proposals. Second, we propose a self-refinement method to refine the pseudo instance labels in a self-supervised scheme and to use the refined labels for training in an online manner. Here, we discover an erroneous phenomenon, semantic drift, that occurred by the missing instances in pseudo instance labels categorized as background class. This semantic drift occurs confusion between background and instance in training and consequently degrades the segmentation performance. We term this problem as semantic drift problem and show that our proposed self-refinement method eliminates the semantic drift problem. The extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and we achieve a considerable performance without off-the-shelf proposal techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/BESTIE.
Common object counting in a natural scene is a challenging problem in computer vision with numerous real-world applications. Existing image-level supervised common object counting approaches only predict the global object count and rely on additional instance-level supervision to also determine object locations. We propose an image-level supervised approach that provides both the global object count and the spatial distribution of object instances by constructing an object category density map. Motivated by psychological studies, we further reduce image-level supervision using a limited object count information (up to four). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose image-level supervised density map estimation for common object counting and demonstrate its effectiveness in image-level supervised instance segmentation. Comprehensive experiments are performed on the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets. Our approach outperforms existing methods, including those using instance-level supervision, on both datasets for common object counting. Moreover, our approach improves state-of-the-art image-level supervised instance segmentation with a relative gain of 17.8% in terms of average best overlap, on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset. Code link: https://github.com/GuoleiSun/CountSeg