Unsupervised Class Generation to Expand Semantic Segmentation Datasets

Semantic segmentation is a computer vision task where classification is performed at the pixel level. Due to this, the process of labeling images for semantic segmentation is time-consuming and expensive. To mitigate this cost there has been a surge in the use of synthetically generated data-usually...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Moltavo, Javier, García Martín, Álvaro, Carballeira López, Pablo, San Miguel Avedillo, Juan Carlos
Format: article
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repository:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/723780
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10486/723780
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jimaging11060172
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Synthetic datasets
Unsupervised domain adaptation
Synthetic data
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Summary:Semantic segmentation is a computer vision task where classification is performed at the pixel level. Due to this, the process of labeling images for semantic segmentation is time-consuming and expensive. To mitigate this cost there has been a surge in the use of synthetically generated data-usually created using simulators or videogames-which, in combination with domain adaptation methods, can effectively learn how to segment real data. Still, these datasets have a particular limitation: due to their closed-set nature, it is not possible to include novel classes without modifying the tool used to generate them, which is often not public. Concurrently, generative models have made remarkable progress, particularly with the introduction of diffusion models, enabling the creation of high-quality images from text prompts without additional supervision. In this work, we propose an unsupervised pipeline that leverages Stable Diffusion and Segment Anything Module to generate class examples with an associated segmentation mask, and a method to integrate generated cutouts for novel classes in semantic segmentation datasets, all with minimal user input. Our approach aims to improve the performance of unsupervised domain adaptation methods by introducing novel samples into the training data without modifications to the underlying algorithms. With our methods, we show how models can not only effectively learn how to segment novel classes, with an average performance of 51% intersection over union for novel classes, but also reduce errors for other, already existing classes, reaching a higher performance level overall