Troubleshooting image segmentation models with human-in-the-loop

Image segmentation lays the foundation for many high-stakes vision applications such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. It is, therefore, of great importance to not only improve the accuracy of segmentation models on well-established benchmarks, but also enhance their robustness in the real world so as to avoid sparse but fatal failures. In this paper, instead of chasing state-of-the-art performance on existing benchmarks, we turn our attention to a new challenging problem: how to efficiently expose failures of “top-performing” segmentation models in the real world and how to leverage such counterexamples to rectify the models. To achieve this with minimal human labelling effort, we first automatically sample a small set of images that are likely to falsify the target model from a large corpus of web images via the maximum discrepancy competition principle. We then propose a weakly labelling strategy to further reduce the number of false positives, before time-consuming pixel-level labelling by humans. Finally, we fine-tune the model to harness the identified failures, and repeat the whole process, resulting in an efficient and progressive framework for troubleshooting segmentation models. We demonstrate the feasibility of our framework using the semantic segmentation task in PASCAL VOC, and find that the fine-tuned model exhibits significantly improved generalization when applied to real-world images with greater content diversity. The code is available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/Troubleshooting_Image_Segmentation. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021.