Prototype as Query for Few Shot Semantic Segmentation
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Suzhou Zhito Technology Co., Ltd（苏州智途科技有限公司）；Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance Company of China Ltd（中国平安财产保险股份有限公司）
Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) was proposed to segment unseen classes in a query image, referring to only a few annotated examples named support images. One of the characteristics of FSS is spatial inconsistency between query and support targets, e.g., texture or appearance. This greatly challenges the generalization ability of methods for FSS, which requires to effectively exploit the dependency of the query image and the support examples. Most existing methods abstracted support features into prototype vectors and implemented the interaction with query features using cosine similarity or feature concatenation. However, this simple interaction may not capture spatial details in query features. To alleviate this limitation, a few methods utilized all pixel-wise support information via computing the pixel-wise correlations between paired query and support features implemented with the attention mechanism of Transformer. These approaches suffer from heavy computation on the dot-product attention between all pixels of support and query features. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework built upon Transformer termed as ProtoFormer to fully capture spatial details in query features. It views the abstracted prototype of the target class in support features as Query and the query features as Key and Value embeddings, which are input to the Transformer decoder. In this way, the spatial details can be better captured and the semantic features of target class in the query image can be focused. The output of the Transformer-based module can be viewed as semantic-aware dynamic kernels to filter out the segmentation mask from the enriched query features. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-$5^{i}$ and COCO-$20^{i}$ show that our ProtoFormer significantly advances the state-of-the-art methods.
Few-shot segmentation targets to segment new classes with few annotated images provided. It is more challenging than traditional semantic segmentation tasks that segment known classes with abundant annotated images. In this paper, we propose a Prototype Refinement Network (PRNet) to attack the challenge of few-shot segmentation. It firstly learns to bidirectionally extract prototypes from both support and query images of the known classes. Furthermore, to extract representative prototypes of the new classes, we use adaptation and fusion for prototype refinement. The step of adaptation makes th…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to segment the target objects in query under the condition of a few annotated support images. Most previous works strive to mine more effective category information from the support to match with the corresponding objects in query. However, they all ignored the category information gap between query and support images. If the objects in them show large intra-class diversity, forcibly migrating the category information from the support to the query is ineffective. To solve this problem, we are the first to introduce an intermediate prototype for mining both d…
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Few-shot object detection, expecting detectors to detect novel classes with a few instances, has made conspicuous progress. However, the prototypes extracted by existing meta-learning based methods still suffer from insufficient representative information and lack awareness of query images, which cannot be adaptively tailored to different query images. Firstly, only the support images are involved for extracting prototypes, resulting in scarce perceptual information of query images. Secondly, all pixels of all support images are treated equally when aggregating features into prototype vectors,…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（Inception人工智能研究院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）
One-shot semantic image segmentation aims to segment the object regions for the novel class with only one annotated image. Recent works adopt the episodic training strategy to mimic the expected situation at testing time. However, these existing approaches simulate the test conditions too strictly during the training process, and thus cannot make full use of the given label information. Besides, these approaches mainly focus on the foreground-background target class segmentation setting. They only utilize binary mask labels for training. In this paper, we propose to leverage the multi-class la…
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；Italian Institute of Technology（意大利理工学院）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Semantic segmentation models have two fundamental weaknesses: i) they require large training sets with costly pixel-level annotations, and ii) they have a static output space, constrained to the classes of the training set. Toward addressing both problems, we introduce a new task, Incremental Few-Shot Segmentation (iFSS). The goal of iFSS is to extend a pretrained segmentation model with new classes from few annotated images and without access to old training data. To overcome the limitations of existing models iniFSS, we propose Prototype-based Incremental Few-Shot Segmentation (PIFS) that co…
Despite the great progress made by deep CNNs in image semantic segmentation, they typically require a large number of densely-annotated images for training and are difficult to generalize to unseen object categories. Few-shot segmentation has thus been developed to learn to perform segmentation from only a few annotated examples. In this paper, we tackle the challenging few-shot segmentation problem from a metric learning perspective and present PANet, a novel prototype alignment network to better utilize the information of the support set. Our PANet learns class-specific prototype representat…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Few-shot segmentation is challenging because objects within the support and query images could significantly differ in appearance and pose. Using a single prototype acquired directly from the support image to segment the query image causes semantic ambiguity. In this paper, we propose prototype mixture models (PMMs), which correlate diverse image regions with multiple prototypes to enforce the prototype-based semantic representation. Estimated by an Expectation-Maximization algorithm, PMMs incorporate rich channel-wised and spatial semantics from limited support images. Utilized as representat…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；VoxelCloud, Inc.（体素云公司）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Despite the tremendous success of deep neural networks in medical image segmentation, they typically require a large amount of costly, expert-level annotated data. Few-shot segmentation approaches address this issue by learning to transfer knowledge from limited quantities of labeled examples. Incorporating appropriate prior knowledge is critical in designing high-performance few-shot segmentation algorithms. Since strong spatial priors exist in many medical imaging modalities, we propose a prototype-based method -- namely, the location-sensitive local prototype network -- that leverages spati…
Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to learn to segment new object classes with only a few annotated examples, which has a wide range of real-world applications. Most existing methods either focus on the restrictive setting of one-way few-shot segmentation or suffer from incomplete coverage of object regions. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot semantic segmentation framework based on the prototype representation. Our key idea is to decompose the holistic class representation into a set of part-aware prototypes, capable of capturing diverse and fine-grained object features. In addition,…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Few-shot segmentation of point cloud remains a challenging task, as there is no effective way to convert local point cloud information to global representation, which hinders the generalization ability of point features. In this study, we propose a bidirectional feature globalization (BFG) approach, which leverages the similarity measurement between point features and prototype vectors to embed global perception to local point features in a bidirectional fashion. With point-to-prototype globalization (Po2PrG), BFG aggregates local point features to prototypes according to similarity weights fr…
SPENet: Self-guided Prototype Enhancement Network for Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China（北京理工大学计算机科学学院）；Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Multimedia Department Xiaomi Inc, Beijing, China（小米公司多媒体部门）；Capital Medical University Affiliated Beijing Friendship Hospital, Beijing, China（首都医科大学附属北京友谊医院）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tencent YouTu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to segment novel-class objects in a given query image with only a few labeled support images. Most advanced solutions exploit a metric learning framework that performs segmentation through matching each query feature to a learned class-specific prototype. However, this framework suffers from biased classification due to incomplete feature comparisons. To address this issue, we present an adaptive prototype representation by introducing class-specific and class-agnostic prototypes and thus construct complete sample pairs for learning semantic alignment with q…
The deep CNNs in image semantic segmentation typically require a large number of densely-annotated images for training and have difficulties in generalizing to unseen object categories. Therefore, few-shot segmentation has been developed to perform segmentation with just a few annotated examples. In this work, we tackle the few-shot segmentation using a self-regularized prototypical network (SRPNet) based on prototype extraction for better utilization of the support information. The proposed SRPNet extracts class-specific prototype representations from support images and generates segmentation…
School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学电子工程学院）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to strengthen the performance of novel object detection with few labeled samples. To alleviate the constraint of few samples, enhancing the generalization ability of learned features for novel objects plays a key role. Thus, the feature learning process of FSOD should focus more on intrinsical object characteristics, which are invariant under different visual changes and therefore are helpful for feature generalization. Unlike previous attempts of the meta-learning paradigm, in this paper, we explore how to enhance object features with intrinsical characte…
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to detect never-seen objects using few examples. This field sees recent improvement owing to the meta-learning techniques by learning how to match between the query image and few-shot class examples, such that the learned model can generalize to few-shot novel classes. However, currently, most of the meta-learning-based methods perform pairwise matching between query image regions (usually proposals) and novel classes separately, therefore failing to take into account multiple relationships among them. In this paper, we propose a novel FSOD model using het…
Traditional semantic segmentation requires a large labeled image dataset and can only be predicted within predefined classes. To solve this problem, few-shot segmentation, which requires only a handful of annotations for the new target class, is important. However, with few-shot segmentation, the target class data distribution in the feature space is sparse and has low coverage because of the slight variations in the sample data. Setting the classification boundary that properly separates the target class from other classes is an impossible task. In particular, it is difficult to classify clas…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to segment novel-class objects in a query image with only a few annotated examples in support images. Most of advanced solutions exploit a metric learning framework that performs segmentation through matching each pixel to a learned foreground prototype. However, this framework suffers from biased classification due to incomplete construction of sample pairs with the foreground prototype only. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce a complementary self-contrastive task into few-shot semantic segmentation. Our new model is able to associate the pi…
Learning Multi-Modal Prototypes for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；The University of Southern Queensland（昆士兰大学）
HKUST（香港科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）
Existing few-shot segmentation methods have achieved great progress based on the support-query matching framework. But they still heavily suffer from the limited coverage of intra-class variations from the few-shot supports provided. Motivated by the simple Gestalt principle that pixels belonging to the same object are more similar than those to different objects of same class, we propose a novel self-support matching strategy to alleviate this problem, which uses query prototypes to match query features, where the query prototypes are collected from high-confidence query predictions. This str…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；The Netherlands Cancer Institute（荷兰癌症研究所）
The key challenge for few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) is how to tailor a desirable interaction among support and query features and/or their prototypes, under the episodic training scenario. Most existing FSS methods implement such support-query interactions by solely leveraging plain operations - e.g., cosine similarity and feature concatenation - for segmenting the query objects. However, these interaction approaches usually cannot well capture the intrinsic object details in the query images that are widely encountered in FSS, e.g., if the query object to be segmented has holes and slo…
Few to Big: Prototype Expansion Network via Diffusion Learner for Point Cloud Few-shot Semantic Segmentation
School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University（湘潭大学数学与计算科学学院）；School of Automation and Electronics Information, Xiangtan University（湘潭大学自动化与电子信息学院）；School of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学自动化学院）
Multi-grained Temporal Prototype Learning for Few-shot Video Object Segmentation
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Point cloud segmentation is a fundamental visual understanding task in 3D vision. A fully supervised point cloud segmentation network often requires a large amount of data with point-wise annotations, which is expensive to obtain. In this work, we present the Compositional Prototype Network that can undertake point cloud segmentation with only a few labeled training data. Inspired by the few-shot learning literature in images, our network directly transfers label information from the limited training data to unlabeled test data for prediction. The network decomposes the representations of comp…
A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Jiangxi Finance and Economics University（江西财经大学）
Current methods for few-shot segmentation (FSSeg) have mainly focused on improving the performance of novel classes while neglecting the performance of base classes. To overcome this limitation, the task of generalized few-shot semantic segmentation (GFSSeg) has been introduced, aiming to predict segmentation masks for both base and novel classes. However, the current prototype-based methods do not explicitly consider the relationship between base and novel classes when updating prototypes, leading to a limited performance in identifying true categories. To address this challenge, we propose a…
Deep learning has achieved tremendous success in computer vision, while medical image segmentation (MIS) remains a challenge, due to the scarcity of data annotations. Meta-learning techniques for few-shot segmentation (Meta-FSS) have been widely used to tackle this challenge, while they neglect possible distribution shifts between the query image and the support set. In contrast, an experienced clinician can perceive and address such shifts by borrowing information from the query image, then fine-tune or calibrate her prior cognitive model accordingly. Inspired by this, we propose Q-Net, a Que…
We address the problem of few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS), which aims to segment novel class objects in a target image with a few annotated samples. Though recent advances have been made by incorporating prototype-based metric learning, existing methods still show limited performance under extreme intra-class object variations and semantically similar inter-class objects due to their poor feature representation. To tackle this problem, we propose a dual prototypical contrastive learning approach tailored to the FSS task to capture the representative semanticfeatures effectively. The main …
Few-shot object detection aims to detect instances of specific categories in a query image with only a handful of support samples. Although this takes less effort than obtaining enough annotated images for supervised object detection, it results in a far inferior performance compared to the conventional object detection methods. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning-based approach that considers the unique characteristics of each support sample. Rather than simply averaging the information of the support samples to generate a single prototype per category, our method can better utilize the…
Few-Shot Segmentation with Global and Local Contrastive Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Institute of Big Data, Fudan University（复旦大学大数据学院）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) methods perform image segmentation for a particular object class in a target (query) image, using a small set of (support) image-mask pairs. Recent deep neural network based FSS methods leverage high-dimensional feature similarity between the foreground features of the support images and the query image features. In this work, we demonstrate gaps in the utilization of this similarity information in existing methods, and present a framework - SimPropNet, to bridge those gaps. We propose to jointly predict the support and query masks to force the support features to s…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Prevalent semantic segmentation solutions, despite their different network designs (FCN based or attention based) and mask decoding strategies (parametric softmax based or pixel-query based), can be placed in one category, by considering the softmax weights or query vectors as learnable class prototypes. In light of this prototype view, this study uncovers several limitations of such parametric segmentation regime, and proposes a nonparametric alternative based on non-learnable prototypes. Instead of prior methods learning a single weight/query vector for each class in a fully parametric manne…
Group-On: Boosting One-Shot Segmentation with Supportive Query
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Notre Dame（诺丁汉大学）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Medical Imaging Artificial Intelligence（浙江省医学影像人工智能重点实验室）；HKUST(Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
Beyond Euclidean Prototypes: Spectral Disentanglement and Geodesic Matching for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation
School of Microelectronics and Communication Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学微电子与通信工程学院）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Research into Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) has attracted great attention, with the goal to segment target objects in a query image given only a few annotated support images of the target class. A key to this challenging task is to fully utilize the information in the support images by exploiting fine-grained correlations between the query and support images. However, most existing approaches either compressed the support information into a few class-wise prototypes, or used partial support information (e.g., only foreground) at the pixel level, causing non-negligible information loss. …
Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation with High-Fidelity Prototypes
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学）；Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Tied Prototype Model for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation
Department of Physics and Technology, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway（物理与技术系，UiT - 北极大学）；Norwegian Centre for Clinical Artificial Intelligence (SPKI)（挪威临床人工智能中心）；University Hospital of North-Norway（北挪威大学医院）；Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）
RUFNet: Query-Guided Support Mask Refinement and Uncertainty Fusion based on Hybrid Mamba for Few-Shot Brain Tumor Segmentation
Department of Language Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学语言科学与技术系）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Chongqing University of Technology（重庆理工大学人工智能学院）；Affiliated Lianyungang Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University（徐州医科大学附属连云港医院）；College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学机电与控制工程学院）
Query-guided Prototype Evolution Network for Few-Shot Segmentation
Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学信息科学研究所）；School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
Symmetrical Joint Learning Support-query Prototypes for Few-shot Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学计算机学院）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学人工智能学院）；University of California at Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学）
Prototype learning is extensively used for few-shot segmentation. Typically, a single prototype is obtained from the support feature by averaging the global object information. However, using one prototype to represent all the information may lead to ambiguities. In this paper, we propose two novel modules, named superpixel-guided clustering (SGC) and guided prototype allocation (GPA), for multiple prototype extraction and allocation. Specifically, SGC is a parameter-free and training-free approach, which extracts more representative prototypes by aggregating similar feature vectors, while GPA…
Few-shot learning requires to recognize novel classes with scarce labeled data. Prototypical network is useful in existing researches, however, training on narrow-size distribution of scarce data usually tends to get biased prototypes. In this paper, we figure out two key influencing factors of the process: the intra-class bias and the cross-class bias. We then propose a simple yet effective approach for prototype rectification in transductive setting. The approach utilizes label propagation to diminish the intra-class bias and feature shifting to diminish the cross-class bias. We also conduct…
Prototype learning and decoder construction are the keys for few-shot segmentation. However, existing methods use only a single prototype generation mode, which can not cope with the intractable problem of objects with various scales. Moreover, the one-way forward propagation adopted by previous methods may cause information dilution from registered features during the decoding process. In this research, we propose a rich prototype generation module (RPGM) and a recurrent prediction enhancement module (RPEM) to reinforce the prototype learning paradigm and build a unified memory-augmented deco…
Few-shot learning aims to recognize new categories using very few labeled samples. Although few-shot learning has witnessed promising development in recent years, most existing methods adopt an average operation to calculate prototypes, thus limited by the outlier samples. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework for few-shot classification, which can learn to generate preferable prototypes from few support data, with the help of an episodic prototype generator module. The generated prototype is meant to be close to a certain \textit{\targetproto{}} and is less influenced by o…
