Weakly Supervised Image Segmentation

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Overview

Weakly supervised image segmentation studies how to produce dense pixel masks when detailed pixel-by-pixel annotations are scarce, costly, or unreliable. Common approaches turn image labels into class activation maps and pseudo-labels, propagate sparse annotations across regions, or use geometric, anatomical, and language-derived constraints; foundation models and vision-language features increasingly provide extra guidance. The methods are tested on standard semantic-segmentation benchmarks as well as medical, industrial, and remote-sensing images, where label types and structures vary widely. A central challenge is recovering complete objects and precise boundaries from incomplete or noisy cues while maintaining reliable performance across domains and annotation settings.

Latest papers

CardsList

46 papers2 papers in the last four weeks, down 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Learning to Segment using Summary Statistics and Weak Supervision

    May 4, 2026Omkar Kulkarni, Edward Raff, Tim OatesUltrasound Image SegmentationImage Segmentation

    University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore MD, USA · Crowdstrike, Austin TX, USA

  2. Semantic Segmentation for Histopathology using Learned Regularization based on Global Proportions

    Apr 27, 2026Yangping Li, Thomas Pinetz, Michael Hölzel +2Computational PathologyImage Segmentation

    Institute of Pathology, University Hospital Bonn, Sigmund-Freud-Str. 25, 53127 Bonn, Germany · Institute for Applied Mathematics, University of Bonn, Endenicher Allee 60, 53115 Bonn, Germany · Institute of Experimental Oncology, University Hospital Bonn, Sigmund-Freud-Str. 25, 53127 Bonn, Germany

  3. Boxes2Pixels: Learning Defect Segmentation from Noisy SAM Masks

    Apr 13, 2026Camile Lendering, Erkut Akdag, Egor BondarevWeakly Supervised Image SegmentationSemantic Segmentation

    AIMS Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology

  4. Weakly-Supervised Lung Nodule Segmentation via Training-Free Guidance of 3D Rectified Flow

    Apr 9, 2026Richard Petersen, Fredrik Kahl, Jennifer AlvénWeakly Supervised Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

    Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

  5. ModuSeg: Decoupling Object Discovery and Semantic Retrieval for Training-Free Weakly Supervised Segmentation

    Apr 8, 2026Qingze He, Fagui Liu, Dengke Zhang +2Weakly Supervised Image SegmentationWeakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

    South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China

  6. PASTA: Vision Transformer Patch Aggregation for Weakly Supervised Target and Anomaly Segmentation

    Apr 7, 2026Melanie Neubauer, Elmar Rueckert, Christian RauchWeakly Supervised Image SegmentationIndustrial Anomaly Detection

    Chair of Cyber Physical Sytems, Technical University of Leoben, 8700 Leoben, Austria

  7. Weakly supervised multimodal segmentation of acoustic borehole images with depth-aware cross-attention

    Mar 21, 2026Jose Luis Lima de Jesus SilvaMultimodal Semantic SegmentationImage Segmentation

    Federal University of Bahia, Institute of Geosciences, Department of Geophysics, Salvador, BA 40170-115, Brazil · Grupo de Estudos e Aplicac¸ ˜ao de Inteligˆencia Artificial em Geof´ısica (GAIA), Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, BA 40170-115, Brazil

  8. Point-to-Mask: From Arbitrary Point Annotations to Mask-Level Infrared Small Target Detection

    Mar 17, 2026Weihua Gao, Wenlong Niu, Jie Tang +3Infrared Small Target DetectionObject Detection

    Key Laboratory of Electronics and Information Technology for Space Systems, National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. · School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.

  9. Analytical Logit Scaling for High-Resolution Sea Ice Topology Retrieval from Weakly Labeled SAR Imagery

    Mar 13, 2026Reda Elwaradi, Julien Gimenez, Stéphane Hordoir +3Remote Sensing Image SegmentationWeakly Supervised Image Segmentation

    Mastère Spécialisé IA Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris Palaiseau, France · DTIS ONERA, Université Paris-Saclay 91120, Palaiseau, France

  10. SAPNet++: Evolving Point-Prompted Instance Segmentation with Semantic and Spatial Awareness

    Feb 25, 2026Zhaoyang Wei, Xumeng Han, Xuehui Yu +4Instance SegmentationWeakly Supervised Image Segmentation

    the School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Science (UCAS), Beijing, 100049, China. · School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), Shanghai, 200240, China. · the School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Science (UCAS), Beijing, 100049, China.

  11. Multimodal MRI Report Findings Supervised Brain Lesion Segmentation with Substructures

    Feb 24, 2026Yubin Ge, Yongsong Huang, Xiaofeng LiuMedical Image SegmentationBrain Tumor Segmentation

    Amazon AWS · Yale University · Tohoku University

  12. Prefer-DAS: Learning from Local Preferences and Sparse Prompts for Domain Adaptive Segmentation of Electron Microscopy

    Feb 23, 2026Jiabao Chen, Shan Xiong, Jialin PengDomain AdaptationUnsupervised Domain Adaptation

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Huaqiao University, Xiamen 361021, China

  13. AnyCXR: Human Anatomy Segmentation of Chest X-ray at Any Acquisition Position using Multi-stage Domain Randomized Synthetic Data with Imperfect Annotations and Conditional Joint Annotation Regularization Learning

    Dec 19, 2025Zifei Dong, Wenjie Wu, Jinkui Hao +3Medical Image SegmentationMulti-Organ Segmentation

    Department of Radiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA · Data Science Institute, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA · Department of Orthopedics, The Second Hospital of Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, Shanxi, P.R. China +2

  14. Through the Looking Glass: A Dual Perspective on Weakly-Supervised Few-Shot Segmentation

    Aug 22, 2025Jiaqi Ma, Guo-Sen Xie, Fang Zhao +1Weakly Supervised Image SegmentationWeakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Suzhou 215163, China

  15. SynSeg: Feature Synergy for Multi-Category Contrastive Learning in End-to-End Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

    Aug 8, 2025Weichen Zhang, Kebin Liu, Fan Dang +3Contrastive LearningWeakly Supervised Image Segmentation

    Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, China · Beijing Jiaotong University, 100044, Beijing, China

  16. Post-Disaster Affected Area Segmentation with a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based EVAP Model using Sentinel-2 and Formosat-5 Imagery

    Jul 21, 2025Yi-Shan Chu, Hsuan-Cheng WeiRemote Sensing Image UnderstandingWeakly Supervised Image Segmentation

    Department of Mathematical Science, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan · Division of Satellite Data Application, Taiwan Space Agency, Hsinchu, Taiwan · Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan