Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2023

Abstract

Extracting class activation maps (CAM) from a classification model often results in poor coverage on foreground objects, i.e., only the discriminative region (e.g., the “head” of “sheep”) is recognized and the rest (e.g., the “leg” of “sheep”) mistakenly as background. The crux behind is that the weight of the classifier (used to compute CAM) captures only the discriminative features of objects. We tackle this by introducing a new computation method for CAM that explicitly captures non-discriminative features as well, thereby expanding CAM to cover whole objects. Specifically, we omit the last pooling layer of the classification model, and perform clustering on all local features of an object class, where “local” means “at a spatial pixel position”. We call the resultant K cluster centers local prototypes - represent local semantics like the “head”, “leg”, and “body” of “sheep”. Given a new image of the class, we compare its unpooled features to every prototype, derive K similarity matrices, and then aggregate them into a heatmap (i.e., our CAM). Our CAM thus captures all local features of the class without discrimination. We evaluate it in the challenging tasks of weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), and plug it in multiple state-of-the-art WSSS methods, such as MCTformer and AMN, by simply replacing their original CAM with ours. Our extensive experiments on standard WSSS benchmarks (PASCAL VOC and MS COCO) show the superiority of our method: consistent improvements with little computational overhead.

Discipline

Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Vancouver, Canada, 2023 June 18-22

First Page

3135

Last Page

3144

Publisher

CVPR

City or Country

Vancouver

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