Large-scale Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation

Powered by the ImageNet dataset, unsupervised learning on large-scale data has made significant advances for classification tasks. There are two major challenges to allowing such an attractive learning modality for segmentation tasks: i) a large-scale benchmark for assessing algorithms is missing; ii) unsupervised category/shape representation learning is difficult. We propose a new problem of large-scale unsupervised semantic segmentation (LUSS) with a newly created benchmark dataset to track the research progress. Based on the ImageNet dataset, we propose the ImageNet-S dataset with 1.2 million training images and 50k high-quality semantic segmentation annotations for evaluation. Our benchmark has a high data diversity and a clear task objective. We also present a simple yet effective method that works surprisingly well for LUSS. In addition, we benchmark related un/weakly/fully supervised methods accordingly, identifying the challenges and possible directions of LUSS.