  An instance with a bad mask might make a composite image that uses it look
fake. This encourages us to learn segmentation by generating realistic
composite images. To achieve this, we propose a novel framework that exploits a
new proposed prior called the independence prior based on Generative
Adversarial Networks (GANs). The generator produces an image with multiple
category-specific instance providers, a layout module and a composition module.
Firstly, each provider independently outputs a category-specific instance image
with a soft mask. Then the provided instances' poses are corrected by the
layout module. Lastly, the composition module combines these instances into a
final image. Training with adversarial loss and penalty for mask area, each
provider learns a mask that is as small as possible but enough to cover a
complete category-specific instance. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation
methods widely use grouping cues modeling the association between image parts,
which are either artificially designed or learned with costly segmentation
labels or only modeled on local pairs. Unlike them, our method automatically
models the dependence between any parts and learns instance segmentation. We
apply our framework in two cases: (1) Foreground segmentation on
category-specific images with box-level annotation. (2) Unsupervised learning
of instance appearances and masks with only one image of homogeneous object
cluster (HOC). We get appealing results in both tasks, which shows the
independence prior is useful for instance segmentation and it is possible to
unsupervisedly learn instance masks with only one image.
