Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) leverages Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to extract spatial information from image-level labels. However, CAMs primarily highlight the most discriminative foreground regions, leading to incomplete results. Prototype-based methods attempt to address this limitation by employing prototype CAMs instead of classifier CAMs. Nevertheless, existing prototype-based methods typically use a single prototype for each class, which is insufficient to capture all attributes of the foreground features due to the significant intra-class variations across different images. Consequently, these methods still struggle with incomplete CAM predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Prototypical Optimal Transport (POT) for WSSS. POT enhances CAM predictions by dividing features into multiple clusters and activating each cluster using its prototype. In this process, a similarity-aware optimal transport is employed to assign features to the most probable clusters. This similarity-aware strategy ensures the prioritization of significant cluster prototypes, thereby improving the accuracy of feature assignment. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive OT-based consistency loss to refine feature representations. This framework effectively overcomes the limitations of single-prototype methods, providing more complete and accurate CAM predictions. Extensive experimental results on standard WSSS benchmarks (PASCAL VOC and MS COCO) demonstrate that our method significantly improves the quality of CAMs and achieves state-of-the-art performances. The source code will be released https://github.com/jianwang91/POT.

Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) has received substantial attention due to its cost-effective annotation process. In WSSS, Class Activation Maps (CAMs) generated via classifier weights tend to focus on the most discriminative region, while the CAMs derived from class prototypes are significantly enhanced to cover more complete regions. However, the prototype CAMs still exhibit limitations such as incomplete localization maps on target objects and the presence of background noise. In this paper, we propose a novel WSSS framework called Classifier-Prototype Mutual Calibration (CPMC) that leverages the characteristics of both classifier and prototype CAMs to address the above issues. Specifically, an iterative refinement strategy based on context feature dependency is applied to refine the original classifier CAMs, which helps to generate improved prototype CAMs. Subsequently, local prototypes are constructed based on the false negative regions and false positive regions extracted from the previous two CAMs, which contribute to completing missing parts of the target object and suppressing background noise respectively. Therefore, CPMC can alleviate the aforementioned issues. Extensive experimental results on standard WSSS benchmarks (PASCAL VOC and MS COCO) show that our method significantly improves the quality of CAMs and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our source code will be released.