  Since acquiring pixel-wise annotations for training convolutional neural
networks for semantic image segmentation is time-consuming, weakly supervised
approaches that only require class tags have been proposed. In this work, we
propose another form of supervision, namely image captions as they can be found
on the Internet. These captions have two advantages. They do not require
additional curation as it is the case for the clean class tags used by current
weakly supervised approaches and they provide textual context for the classes
present in an image. To leverage such textual context, we deploy a multi-modal
network that learns a joint embedding of the visual representation of the image
and the textual representation of the caption. The network estimates text
activation maps (TAMs) for class names as well as compound concepts, i.e.
combinations of nouns and their attributes. The TAMs of compound concepts
describing classes of interest substantially improve the quality of the
estimated class activation maps which are then used to train a network for
semantic segmentation. We evaluate our method on the COCO dataset where it
achieves state of the art results for weakly supervised image segmentation.
