  Methods that move towards less supervised scenarios are key for image
segmentation, as dense labels demand significant human intervention. Generally,
the annotation burden is mitigated by labeling datasets with weaker forms of
supervision, e.g. image-level labels or bounding boxes. Another option are
semi-supervised settings, that commonly leverage a few strong annotations and a
huge number of unlabeled/weakly-labeled data. In this paper, we revisit
semi-supervised segmentation schemes and narrow down significantly the
annotation budget (in terms of total labeling time of the training set)
compared to previous approaches. With a very simple pipeline, we demonstrate
that at low annotation budgets, semi-supervised methods outperform by a wide
margin weakly-supervised ones for both semantic and instance segmentation. Our
approach also outperforms previous semi-supervised works at a much reduced
labeling cost. We present results for the Pascal VOC benchmark and unify weakly
and semi-supervised approaches by considering the total annotation budget, thus
allowing a fairer comparison between methods.
