BoundMatch: Boundary detection applied to semi-supervised segmentation

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Main Authors: Ishikawa, Haruya, Aoki, Yoshimitsu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ishikawa, Haruya
Aoki, Yoshimitsu
author_facet Ishikawa, Haruya
Aoki, Yoshimitsu
contents Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SS-SS) aims to mitigate the heavy annotation burden of dense pixel labeling by leveraging abundant unlabeled images alongside a small labeled set. While current consistency regularization methods achieve strong results, most do not explicitly model boundaries as a separate learning objective. In this paper, we propose BoundMatch, a novel multi-task SS-SS framework that explicitly integrates semantic boundary detection into a teacher-student consistency regularization pipeline. Our core mechanism, Boundary Consistency Regularized Multi-Task Learning (BCRM), enforces prediction agreement between teacher and student models on both segmentation masks and detailed semantic boundaries, providing complementary supervision from two independent tasks. To further enhance performance and encourage sharper boundaries, BoundMatch incorporates two lightweight fusion modules: Boundary-Semantic Fusion (BSF) injects learned boundary cues into the segmentation decoder, while Spatial Gradient Fusion (SGF) refines boundary predictions using mask gradients, yielding more reliable boundary pseudo-labels. This framework is built upon SAMTH, a strong teacher-student baseline featuring a Harmonious Batch Normalization (HBN) update strategy for improved stability. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets including Cityscapes and Pascal VOC show that BoundMatch achieves competitive performance against current state-of-the-art methods. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the new Cityscapes benchmark with DINOv2 foundation model. Ablation studies highlight BoundMatch's ability to improve boundary-specific evaluation metrics, its effectiveness in realistic large-scale unlabeled data scenario, and applicability to lightweight architectures for mobile deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23519
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BoundMatch: Boundary detection applied to semi-supervised segmentation
Ishikawa, Haruya
Aoki, Yoshimitsu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SS-SS) aims to mitigate the heavy annotation burden of dense pixel labeling by leveraging abundant unlabeled images alongside a small labeled set. While current consistency regularization methods achieve strong results, most do not explicitly model boundaries as a separate learning objective. In this paper, we propose BoundMatch, a novel multi-task SS-SS framework that explicitly integrates semantic boundary detection into a teacher-student consistency regularization pipeline. Our core mechanism, Boundary Consistency Regularized Multi-Task Learning (BCRM), enforces prediction agreement between teacher and student models on both segmentation masks and detailed semantic boundaries, providing complementary supervision from two independent tasks. To further enhance performance and encourage sharper boundaries, BoundMatch incorporates two lightweight fusion modules: Boundary-Semantic Fusion (BSF) injects learned boundary cues into the segmentation decoder, while Spatial Gradient Fusion (SGF) refines boundary predictions using mask gradients, yielding more reliable boundary pseudo-labels. This framework is built upon SAMTH, a strong teacher-student baseline featuring a Harmonious Batch Normalization (HBN) update strategy for improved stability. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets including Cityscapes and Pascal VOC show that BoundMatch achieves competitive performance against current state-of-the-art methods. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the new Cityscapes benchmark with DINOv2 foundation model. Ablation studies highlight BoundMatch's ability to improve boundary-specific evaluation metrics, its effectiveness in realistic large-scale unlabeled data scenario, and applicability to lightweight architectures for mobile deployment.
title BoundMatch: Boundary detection applied to semi-supervised segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23519