  We are interested in inferring object segmentation by leveraging only object
class information, and by considering only minimal priors on the object
segmentation task. This problem could be viewed as a kind of weakly supervised
segmentation task, and naturally fits the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL)
framework: every training image is known to have (or not) at least one pixel
corresponding to the image class label, and the segmentation task can be
rewritten as inferring the pixels belonging to the class of the object (given
one image, and its object class). We propose a Convolutional Neural
Network-based model, which is constrained during training to put more weight on
pixels which are important for classifying the image. We show that at test
time, the model has learned to discriminate the right pixels well enough, such
that it performs very well on an existing segmentation benchmark, by adding
only few smoothing priors. Our system is trained using a subset of the Imagenet
dataset and the segmentation experiments are performed on the challenging
Pascal VOC dataset (with no fine-tuning of the model on Pascal VOC). Our model
beats the state of the art results in weakly supervised object segmentation
task by a large margin. We also compare the performance of our model with state
of the art fully-supervised segmentation approaches.
