SS-CPGAN: Self-Supervised Cut-and-Pasting Generative Adversarial Network for Object Segmentation

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Mar 31;23(7):3649. doi: 10.3390/s23073649.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel self-supervised based Cut-and-Paste GAN to perform foreground object segmentation and generate realistic composite images without manual annotations. We accomplish this goal by a simple yet effective self-supervised approach coupled with the U-Net discriminator. The proposed method extends the ability of the standard discriminators to learn not only the global data representations via classification (real/fake) but also learn semantic and structural information through pseudo labels created using the self-supervised task. The proposed method empowers the generator to create meaningful masks by forcing it to learn informative per-pixel and global image feedback from the discriminator. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the standard benchmark datasets.

Keywords: cut-and-paste; generative adversarial networks; segmentation; self-supervised learning.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.