Semi-Supervised Semantic Image Segmentation by Deep Diffusion Models and Generative Adversarial Networks

Typically, deep learning models for image segmentation tasks are trained using large datasets of images annotated at the pixel level, which can be expensive and highly time-consuming. A way to reduce the amount of annotated images required for training is to adopt a semi-supervised approach. In this regard, generative deep learning models, concretely Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have been adapted to semi-supervised training of segmentation tasks. This work proposes MaskGDM, a deep learning architecture combining some ideas from EditGAN, a GAN that jointly models images and their segmentations, together with a generative diffusion model. With careful integration, we find that using a generative diffusion model can improve EditGAN performance results in multiple segmentation datasets, both multi-class and with binary labels. According to the quantitative results obtained, the proposed model improves multi-class image segmentation when compared to the EditGAN and DatasetGAN models, respectively, by 4.5% and 5.0%. Moreover, using the ISIC dataset, our proposal improves the results from other models by up to 11% for the binary image segmentation approach.