We present LSeg, a novel model for language-driven semantic image segmentation. LSeg uses a text encoder to compute embeddings of descriptive input labels (e.g.,"grass"or"building") together with a transformer-based image encoder that computes dense per-pixel embeddings of the input image. The image encoder is trained with a contrastive objective to align pixel embeddings to the text embedding of the corresponding semantic class. The text embeddings provide a flexible label representation in which semantically similar labels map to similar regions in the embedding space (e.g.,"cat"and"furry"). This allows LSeg to generalize to previously unseen categories at test time, without retraining or even requiring a single additional training sample. We demonstrate that our approach achieves highly competitive zero-shot performance compared to existing zero- and few-shot semantic segmentation methods, and even matches the accuracy of traditional segmentation algorithms when a fixed label set is provided. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/isl-org/lang-seg.

Language-driven Semantic Segmentation

Grouping and recognition are important components of visual scene understanding, e.g., for object detection and semantic segmentation. With end-to-end deep learning systems, grouping of image regions usually happens implicitly via top-down supervision from pixel-level recognition labels. Instead, in this paper, we propose to bring back the grouping mechanism into deep networks, which allows semantic segments to emerge automatically with only text supervision. We propose a hierarchical Grouping Vision Transformer (GroupViT), which goes beyond the regular grid structure representation and learns to group image regions into progressively larger arbitrary-shaped segments. We train GroupViT jointly with a text encoder on a large-scale image-text dataset via contrastive losses. With only text supervision and without any pixel-level annotations, GroupViT learns to group together semantic regions and successfully transfers to the task of semantic segmentation in a zero-shot manner, i.e., without any further fine-tuning. It achieves a zero-shot accuracy of 52.3% mIoU on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and 22.4% mIoU on PASCAL Context datasets, and performs competitively to state-of-the-art transfer-learning methods requiring greater levels of supervision. We open-source our code at https://github.com/NVlabs/GroupViT.

GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision

Few-shot segmentation has been attracting a lot of attention due to its effectiveness to segment unseen object classes with a few annotated samples. Most existing approaches use masked Global Average Pooling (GAP) to encode an annotated support image to a feature vector to facilitate query image segmentation. However, this pipeline unavoidably loses some discriminative information due to the average operation. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective self-guided learning approach, where the lost critical information is mined. Specifically, through making an initial prediction for the annotated support image, the covered and uncovered foreground regions are encoded to the primary and auxiliary support vectors using masked GAP, respectively. By aggregating both primary and auxiliary support vectors, better segmentation performances are obtained on query images. Enlightened by our self-guided module for 1-shot segmentation, we propose a cross-guided module for multiple shot segmentation, where the final mask is fused using predictions from multiple annotated samples with high-quality support vectors contributing more and vice versa. This module improves the final prediction in the inference stage without re-training. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performances on both PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets. Source code is available at https://github.com/zbf1991/SCL.

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Self-Guided and Cross-Guided Learning for Few-Shot Segmentation

Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to segment unseen class objects given very few densely-annotated support images from the same class. Existing FSS methods find the query object by using support prototypes or by directly relying on heuristic multi-scale feature fusion. However, they fail to fully leverage the high-order appearance relationships between multi-scale features among the support-query image pairs, thus leading to an inaccurate localization of the query objects. To tackle the above challenge, we propose an end-to-end scale-aware graph neural network (SAGNN) by reasoning the cross-scale relations among the support-query images for FSS. Specifically, a scale-aware graph is first built by taking support-induced multi-scale query features as nodes and, meanwhile, each edge is modeled as the pairwise interaction of its connected nodes. By progressive message passing over this graph, SAGNN is capable of capturing cross-scale relations and overcoming object variations (e.g., appearance, scale and location), and can thus learn more precise node embeddings. This in turn enables it to predict more accurate foreground objects. Moreover, to make full use of the location relations across scales for the query image, a novel self-node collaboration mechanism is proposed to enrich the current node, which endows SAGNN the ability of perceiving different resolutions of the same objects. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i show that SAGNN achieves state-of-the-art results.

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Scale-Aware Graph Neural Network for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

We show that the way inference is performed in few-shot segmentation tasks has a substantial effect on performances -- an aspect often overlooked in the literature in favor of the meta-learning paradigm. We introduce a transductive inference for a given query image, leveraging the statistics of its unlabeled pixels, by optimizing a new loss containing three complementary terms: i) the cross-entropy on the labeled support pixels; ii) the Shannon entropy of the posteriors on the unlabeled query-image pixels; and iii) a global KL-divergence regularizer based on the proportion of the predicted foreground. As our inference uses a simple linear classifier of the extracted features, its computational load is comparable to inductive inference and can be used on top of any base training. Foregoing episodic training and using only standard cross-entropy training on the base classes, our inference yields competitive performances on standard benchmarks in the 1-shot scenarios. As the number of available shots increases, the gap in performances widens: on PASCAL-5i, our method brings about 5% and 6% improvements over the state-of-the-art, in the 5- and 10-shot scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a new setting that includes domain shifts, where the base and novel classes are drawn from different datasets. Our method achieves the best performances in this more realistic setting. Our code is freely available online: this https URL.

Few-Shot Segmentation Without Meta-Learning: A Good Transductive Inference Is All You Need?

Few-shot segmentation has recently generated great popularity, addressing the challenging yet important problem of segmenting objects from unseen categories with scarce annotated support images. The crux of few-shot segmentation is to extract object information from the support image and then propagate it to guide the segmentation of query images. In this paper, we propose the Democratic Attention Network (DAN) for few-shot semantic segmentation. We introduce the democratized graph attention mechanism, which can activate more pixels on the object to establish a robust correspondence between support and query images. Thus, the network is able to propagate more guiding information of foreground objects from support to query images, enhancing its robustness and generalizability to new objects. Furthermore, we propose multi-scale guidance by designing a refinement fusion unit to fuse features from intermediate layers for the segmentation of the query image. This offers an efficient way of leveraging multi-level semantic information to achieve more accurate segmentation. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed DAN achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, surpassing the previous methods by large margins. The thorough ablation studies further reveal its great effectiveness for few-shot semantic segmentation.

Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation with Democratic Attention Networks

In this work we present SwiftNet for real-time semisupervised video object segmentation (one-shot VOS), which reports 77.8% $\mathcal{J}\& \mathcal{F}$ and 70 FPS on DAVIS 2017 validation dataset, leading all present solutions in overall accuracy and speed performance. We achieve this by elaborately compressing spatiotemporal redundancy in matching-based VOS via Pixel-Adaptive Memory (PAM). Temporally, PAM adaptively triggers memory updates on frames where objects display noteworthy inter-frame variations. Spatially, PAM selectively performs memory update and match on dynamic pixels while ignoring the static ones, significantly reducing redundant computations wasted on segmentation-irrelevant pixels. To promote efficient reference encoding, light-aggregation encoder is also introduced in SwiftNet deploying reversed sub-pixel. We hope SwiftNet could set a strong and efficient baseline for real-time VOS and facilitate its application in mobile vision. The source code of SwiftNet can be found at https://github.com/haochenheheda/SwiftNet.

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SwiftNet: Real-time Video Object Segmentation

Learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) has recently gained great popularity, which can efficiently infer depth map and reconstruct fine-grained scene geometry. Previous methods calculate the variance of the corresponding pixel pairs to determine whether they are matched mostly based on the pixel-wise measure, which fails to consider the interdependence among pixels and is ineffective on the matching of texture-less or occluded regions. These false matching problems challenge MVS and result in its most failure cases. To address the issues, we introduce a Long-range Attention Network (LANet) to selectively aggregate reference features to each position to capture the long-range interdependence across the entire space. As a result, similar features relate to each other regardless of their distance, propagating more guiding information for the effective match. Furthermore, we introduce a new loss to supervise the intermediate probability volume by constraining its distribution reasonably centered at the true depth. Extensive experiments on large-scale DTU dataset demonstrate that the proposed LANet achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous methods by a large margin. Our method is generic and also achieves comparable results on outdoor Tanks and Temples dataset without any fine-tuning, which validates our method’s generalization ability.

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Long-range Attention Network for Multi-View Stereo

In this paper, we propose variational prototype inference to address few-shot semantic segmentation in a probabilistic framework. A probabilistic latent variable model infers the distribution of the prototype that is treated as the latent variable. We formulate the optimization as a variational inference problem, which is established with an amortized inference network based on an auto-encoder architecture. The probabilistic modeling of the prototype enhances its generalization ability to handle the inherent uncertainty caused by limited data and the huge intra-class variations of objects. Moreover, it offers a principled way to incorporate the prototype extracted from support images into the prediction of the segmentation maps for query images. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on three benchmark datasets. Ablation studies show the effectiveness of variational prototype inference for few-shot semantic segmentation by probabilistic modeling. On all three benchmarks, our proposal achieves high segmentation accuracy and surpasses previous methods by considerable margins.

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Variational Prototype Inference for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is widely used in object detection pipelines for removing duplicated bounding boxes. The inconsistency between the confidence for NMS and the real localization confidence seriously affects detection performance. Prior works propose to predict Intersection-over-Union (IoU) between bounding boxes and corresponding ground-truths to improve NMS, while accurately predicting IoU is still a challenging problem. We argue that the complex definition of IoU and feature misalignment make it difficult to predict IoU accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel Decoupled IoU Regression (DIR) model to handle these problems. The proposed DIR decouples the traditional localization confidence metric IoU into two new metrics, Purity and Integrity. Purity reflects the proportion of the object area in the detected bounding box, and Integrity refers to the completeness of the detected object area. Separately predicting Purity and Integrity can divide the complex mapping between the bounding box and its IoU into two clearer mappings and model them independently. In addition, a simple but effective feature realignment approach is also introduced to make the IoU regressor work in a hindsight manner, which can make the target mapping more stable. The proposed DIR can be conveniently integrated with existing two-stage detectors and significantly improve their performance. Through a simple implementation of DIR with HTC, we obtain 51.3% AP on MS COCO benchmark, which outperforms previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art.

Haochen Wang

Papers

Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation with Democratic Attention Networks

SwiftNet: Real-time Video Object Segmentation

Long-range Attention Network for Multi-View Stereo

Variational Prototype Inference for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Decoupled IoU Regression for Object Detection