Title: Self-supervised Training of Proposal-based Segmentation via Background Prediction. Abstract: While supervised object detection and segmentation methods achieve impressive accuracy, they generalize poorly to images whose appearance significantly differs from the data they have been trained on. To address this in scenarios where annotating data is prohibitively expensive, we introduce a self-supervised approach to detection and segmentation, able to work with monocular images captured with a moving camera. At the heart of our approach lies the observations that object segmentation and background reconstruction are linked tasks, and that, for structured scenes, background regions can be re-synthesized from their surroundings, whereas regions depicting the object cannot.
We encode this intuition as a self-supervised loss function that we exploit to train a proposal-based segmentation network. To account for the discrete nature of the proposals, we develop a Monte Carlo-based training strategy that allows the algorithm to explore the large space of object proposals. We apply our method to human detection and segmentation in images that visually depart from those of standard benchmarks, achieving competitive results compared to the few existing self-supervised methods and approaching the accuracy of supervised ones that exploit large annotated datasets.