Online Self-Training Driven Attention-Guided Self-Mimicking Network for Semantic Segmentation

In the realm of semantic segmentation tasks, knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as a prominent strategy, leveraging the transfer of mature knowledge from large teacher networks to enhance the performance of smaller student networks. However, existing methods often rely heavily on high-quality yet cumbersome teacher networks, leading to a complex training process. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel approach termed self-training driven attention-guided self-mimicking online ensemble network. Our proposed method begins by employing intermediate channel-joint attention maps to guide image augmentation. Both the original and augmented images are then input into the networks. Leveraging intermediate feature maps and predictive predictions generated from the two images, we employ KD to uncover invariant features. To further harness representation potential through learning from credible predictions, we introduce a self-training mechanism. This mechanism utilizes an exponential moving average (EMA)-teacher network constructed using the exponential moving average technique to generate feature maps and predicted posterior probabilities. The knowledge of the EMA-teacher is subsequently transferred to the student network through distillation. Extensive experiments and visualization analyses conducted on multiple benchmark datasets, including Cityscapes, Pascal VOC, CamVid, and ADE20k, validate the effectiveness of self-training driven attention-guided self-mimicking network (ST-ASMNet). The interpretability of our method is further validated through visualization and analysis. Our code will be publicly available.