Modern approaches have proved the huge potential of addressing semantic segmentation as a mask classification task which is widely used in instance-level segmentation. This paradigm trains models by assigning part of object queries to ground truths via conventional one-to-one matching. However, we observe that the popular video semantic segmentation (VSS) dataset has limited categories per video, meaning less than 10% of queries could be matched to receive meaningful gradient updates during VSS training. This inefficiency limits the full expressive potential of all queries.Thus, we present a novel solution THE-Mask for VSS, which introduces temporal-aware hierarchical object queries for the first time. Specifically, we propose to use a simple two-round matching mechanism to involve more queries matched with minimal cost during training while without any extra cost during inference. To support our more-to-one assignment, in terms of the matching results, we further design a hierarchical loss to train queries with their corresponding hierarchy of primary or secondary. Moreover, to effectively capture temporal information across frames, we propose a temporal aggregation decoder that fits seamlessly into the mask-classification paradigm for VSS. Utilizing temporal-sensitive multi-level queries, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the latest challenging VSS benchmark VSPW without bells and whistles.
Range-view based LiDAR segmentation methods are attractive for practical applications due to their direct inheritance from efficient 2D CNN architectures. In literature, most range-view based methods follow the per-pixel classification paradigm. Recently, in the image segmentation domain, another paradigm formulates segmentation as a mask-classification problem and has achieved remarkable performance. This raises an interesting question: can the mask-classification paradigm benefit the range-view based LiDAR segmentation and achieve better performance than the counterpart per-pixel paradigm? T…
Instance segmentation is a promising yet challenging topic in computer vision. Recent approaches such as Mask R-CNN typically divide this problem into two parts -- a detection component and a mask generation branch, and mostly focus on the improvement of the detection part. In this paper, we present an approach that extends Mask R-CNN with five novel optimization techniques for improving the mask generation branch and reducing the conflicts between the mask branch and the detection component in training. These five techniques are independent to each other and can be flexibly utilized in buildi…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA)（国际数字经济研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
In this paper we present Mask DINO, a unified object detection and segmentation framework. Mask DINO extends DINO (DETR with Improved Denoising Anchor Boxes) by adding a mask prediction branch which supports all image segmentation tasks (instance, panoptic, and semantic). It makes use of the query embeddings from DINO to dot-product a high-resolution pixel embedding map to predict a set of binary masks. Some key components in DINO are extended for segmentation through a shared architecture and training process. Mask DINO is simple, efficient, and scalable, and it can benefit from joint large-s…
In this work, we propose a mask propagation network to treat the video segmentation problem as a concept of the guided instance segmentation. Similar to most MaskTrack based video segmentation methods, our method takes the mask probability map of previous frame and the appearance of current frame as inputs, and predicts the mask probability map for the current frame. Specifically, we adopt the Xception backbone based DeepLab v3+ model as the probability map predictor in our prediction pipeline. Besides, instead of the full image and the original mask probability, our network takes the region o…
SenseTime（商汤科技）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Most weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods follow the pipeline that generates pseudo-masks initially and trains the segmentation model with the pseudo-masks in fully supervised manner after. However, we find some matters related to the pseudo-masks, including high quality pseudo-masks generation from class activation maps (CAMs), and training with noisy pseudo-mask supervision. For these matters, we propose the following designs to push the performance to new state-of-art: (i) Coefficient of Variation Smoothing to smooth the CAMs adaptively; (ii) Proportional Pseudo-mask Gener…
Tongji University（同济大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
To date, instance segmentation is dominated by twostage methods, as pioneered by Mask R-CNN. In contrast, one-stage alternatives cannot compete with Mask R-CNN in mask AP, mainly due to the difficulty of compactly representing masks, making the design of one-stage methods very challenging. In this work, we propose a simple singleshot instance segmentation framework, termed mask encoding based instance segmentation (MEInst). Instead of predicting the two-dimensional mask directly, MEInst distills it into a compact and fixed-dimensional representation vector, which allows the instance segmentati…
Recently, several weakly supervised learning methods have been devoted to utilize bounding box supervision for training deep semantic segmentation models. Most existing methods usually leverage the generic proposal generators (e.g., dense CRF and MCG) to produce enhanced segmentation masks for further training segmentation models. These proposal generators, however, are generic and not specifically designed for box-supervised semantic segmentation, thereby leaving some leeway for improving segmentation performance. In this paper, we aim at seeking for a more accurate learning-based class-agnos…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；HKUST（香港科技大学）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）
Two-stage and query-based instance segmentation methods have achieved remarkable results. However, their segmented masks are still very coarse. In this paper, we present Mask Transfiner for high-quality and efficient instance segmentation. Instead of operating on regular dense tensors, our Mask Transfiner decomposes and represents the image regions as a quadtree. Our transformer-based approach only processes detected error-prone tree nodes and self-corrects their errors in parallel. While these sparse pixels only constitute a small proportion of the total number, they are critical to the final…
This work introduces a new proposal-free instance segmentation method that builds on single-instance segmentation masks predicted across the entire image in a sliding window style. In contrast to related approaches, our method concurrently predicts all masks, one for each pixel, and thus resolves any conflict jointly across the entire image. Specifically, predictions from overlapping masks are combined into edge weights of a signed graph that is subsequently partitioned to obtain all final instances concurrently. The result is a parameter-free method that is strongly robust to noise and priori…
Fully supervised semantic segmentation learns from dense masks, which requires heavy annotation cost for closed set. In this paper, we use natural language as supervision without any pixel-level annotation for open world segmentation. We call the proposed framework as FreeSeg, where the mask is freely available from raw feature map of pretraining model. Compared with zero-shot or openset segmentation, FreeSeg doesn't require any annotated masks, and it widely predicts categories beyond class-agnostic unsupervised segmentation. Specifically, FreeSeg obtains free mask from Image-Text Similarity …
Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Modern approaches typically formulate semantic segmentation as a per-pixel classification task, while instance-level segmentation is handled with an alternative mask classification. Our key insight: mask classification is sufficiently general to solve both semantic- and instance-level segmentation tasks in a unified manner using the exact same model, loss, and training procedure. Following this observation, we propose MaskFormer, a simple mask classification model which predicts a set of binary masks, each associated with a single global class label prediction. Overall, the proposed mask class…
Hebei University of Technology（河北工业大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；TU Wien（维也纳技术大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Existing self-supervised learning methods based on contrastive learning and masked image modeling have demonstrated impressive performances. However, current masked image modeling methods are mainly utilized in natural images, and their applications in medical images are relatively lacking. Besides, their fixed high masking strategy limits the upper bound of conditional mutual information, and the gradient noise is considerable, making less the learned representation information. Motivated by these limitations, in this paper, we propose masked patches selection and adaptive masking strategy ba…
Binary grid mask representation is broadly used in instance segmentation. A representative instantiation is Mask R-CNN which predicts masks on a $28\times 28$ binary grid. Generally, a low-resolution grid is not sufficient to capture the details, while a high-resolution grid dramatically increases the training complexity. In this paper, we propose a new mask representation by applying the discrete cosine transform(DCT) to encode the high-resolution binary grid mask into a compact vector. Our method, termed DCT-Mask, could be easily integrated into most pixel-based instance segmentation methods…
Deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is the state-of-the-art method for image segmentation, which is one of key challenging computer vision tasks. However, DCNN requires a lot of training images with corresponding image masks to get a good segmentation result. Image annotation software which is easy to use and allows fast image mask generation is in great demand. To the best of our knowledge, all existing image annotation software support only drawing bounding polygons, bounding boxes, or bounding ellipses to mark target objects. These existing software are inefficient when targeting objec…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；The College of New Jersey（新泽西学院）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
We study few-shot semantic segmentation that aims to segment a target object from a query image when provided with a few annotated support images of the target class. Several recent methods resort to a feature masking (FM) technique to discard irrelevant feature activations which eventually facilitates the reliable prediction of segmentation mask. A fundamental limitation of FM is the inability to preserve the fine-grained spatial details that affect the accuracy of segmentation mask, especially for small target objects. In this paper, we develop a simple, effective, and efficient approach to …
The representative instance segmentation methods mostly segment different object instances with a mask of the fixed resolution, e.g., 28*28 grid. However, a low-resolution mask loses rich details, while a high-resolution mask incurs quadratic computation overhead. It is a challenging task to predict the optimal binary mask for each instance. In this paper, we propose to dynamically select suitable masks for different object proposals. First, a dual-level Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) with adaptive feature aggregation is developed to gradually increase the mask grid resolution, ensuring high-qu…
Self-attention is of vital importance in semantic segmentation as it enables modeling of long-range context, which translates into improved performance. We argue that it is equally important to model short-range context, especially to tackle cases where not only the regions of interest are small and ambiguous, but also when there exists an imbalance between the semantic classes. To this end, we propose Masked Supervised Learning (MaskSup), an effective single-stage learning paradigm that models both short- and long-range context, capturing the contextual relationships between pixels via random…
In this work, we present a new operator, called Instance Mask Projection (IMP), which projects a predicted Instance Segmentation as a new feature for semantic segmentation. It also supports back propagation so is trainable end-to-end. Our experiments show the effectiveness of IMP on both Clothing Parsing (with complex layering, large deformations, and non-convex objects), and on Street Scene Segmentation (with many overlapping instances and small objects). On the Varied Clothing Parsing dataset (VCP), we show instance mask projection can improve 3 points on mIOU from a state-of-the-art Panopti…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA)（国际数字经济研究院（IDEA））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
We present a mask-piloted Transformer which improves masked-attention in Mask2Former for image segmentation. The improvement is based on our observation that Mask2Former suffers from inconsistent mask predictions between consecutive decoder layers, which leads to inconsistent optimization goals and low utilization of decoder queries. To address this problem, we propose a mask-piloted training approach, which additionally feeds noised ground-truth masks in masked-attention and trains the model to reconstruct the original ones. Compared with the predicted masks used in mask-attention, the ground…
Google Inc.（谷歌公司）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；UCLA（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
In this work, we tackle the problem of instance segmentation, the task of simultaneously solving object detection and semantic segmentation. Towards this goal, we present a model, called MaskLab, which produces three outputs: box detection, semantic segmentation, and direction prediction. Building on top of the Faster-RCNN object detector, the predicted boxes provide accurate localization of object instances. Within each region of interest, MaskLab performs foreground/background segmentation by combining semantic and direction prediction. Semantic segmentation assists the model in distinguishi…
The key to a successful cascade architecture for precise instance segmentation is to fully leverage the relationship between bounding box detection and mask segmentation across multiple stages. Although modern instance segmentation cascades achieve leading performance, they mainly make use of a unidirectional relationship, i.e., mask segmentation can benefit from iteratively refined bounding box detection. In this paper, we investigate an alternative direction, i.e., how to take the advantage of precise mask segmentation for bounding box detection in a cascade architecture. We propose a Deeply…
LlamaSeg: Image Segmentation via Autoregressive Mask Generation
Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ)（广东人工智能与数字经济实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Meituan（美团）；Division of AMC and Department of ECE, HKUST（HKUST AMC 分部和电子工程系）
We tackle open-world semantic segmentation, which aims at learning to segment arbitrary visual concepts in images, by using only image-text pairs without dense annotations. Existing open-world segmentation methods have shown impressive advances by employing contrastive learning (CL) to learn diverse visual concepts and transferring the learned image-level understanding to the segmentation task. However, these CL-based methods suffer from a train-test discrepancy, since it only considers image-text alignment during training, whereas segmentation requires region-text alignment during testing. In…
Hierarchical clustering is an effective and efficient approach widely used for classical image segmentation methods. However, many existing methods using neural networks generate segmentation masks directly from per-pixel features, complicating the architecture design and degrading the interpretability. In this work, we propose a simpler, more interpretable architecture, called HCFormer. HCFormer accomplishes image segmentation by bottom-up hierarchical clustering and allows us to interpret, visualize, and evaluate the intermediate results as hierarchical clustering results. HCFormer can addre…
Northwestern University（西北大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
In this work, we present a novel and effective framework to facilitate object detection with the instance-level segmentation information that is only supervised by bounding box annotation. Starting from the joint object detection and instance segmentation network, we propose to recursively estimate the pseudo ground-truth object masks from the instance-level object segmentation network training, and then enhance the detection network with top-down segmentation feedbacks. The pseudo ground truth mask and network parameters are optimized alternatively to mutually benefit each other. To obtain th…
DFormer: Diffusion-guided Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
CM-MaskSD: Cross-Modality Masked Self-Distillation for Referring Image Segmentation
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We introduce an approach to integrate segmentation information within a convolutional neural network (CNN). This counter-acts the tendency of CNNs to smooth information across regions and increases their spatial precision. To obtain segmentation information, we set up a CNN to provide an embedding space where region co-membership can be estimated based on Euclidean distance. We use these embeddings to compute a local attention mask relative to every neuron position. We incorporate such masks in CNNs and replace the convolution operation with a "segmentation-aware" variant that allows a neuron …
Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；Huazhong University of Science & Technology（华中科技大学）
Labeling objects with pixel-wise segmentation requires a huge amount of human labor compared to bounding boxes. Most existing methods for weakly supervised instance segmentation focus on designing heuristic losses with priors from bounding boxes. While, we find that box-supervised methods can produce some fine segmentation masks and we wonder whether the detectors could learn from these fine masks while ignoring low-quality masks. To answer this question, we present BoxTeacher, an efficient and end-to-end training framework for high-performance weakly supervised instance segmentation, which le…
We propose Clustering Mask Transformer (CMT-DeepLab), a transformer-based framework for panoptic segmentation designed around clustering. It rethinks the existing transformer architectures used in segmentation and detection; CMT-DeepLab considers the object queries as cluster centers, which fill the role of grouping the pixels when applied to segmentation. The clustering is computed with an alternating procedure, by first assigning pixels to the clusters by their feature affinity, and then updating the cluster centers and pixel features. Together, these operations comprise the Clustering Mask …
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories（NTT媒体情报实验室）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Weakly-supervised instance segmentation, which could greatly save labor and time cost of pixel mask annotation, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The commonly used pipeline firstly utilizes conventional image segmentation methods to automatically generate initial masks and then use them to train an off-the-shelf segmentation network in an iterative way. However, the initial generated masks usually contains a notable proportion of invalid masks which are mainly caused by small object instances. Directly using these initial masks to train segmentation model is harmful for the p…
MonolithAI；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）；Hacettepe University（哈切特佩大学）
Just like other few-shot learning problems, few-shot segmentation aims to minimize the need for manual annotation, which is particularly costly in segmentation tasks. Even though the few-shot setting reduces this cost for novel test classes, there is still a need to annotate the training data. To alleviate this need, we propose a self-supervised training approach for learning few-shot segmentation models. We first use unsupervised saliency estimation to obtain pseudo-masks on images. We then train a simple prototype based model over different splits of pseudo masks and augmentations of images.…
Instance segmentation methods require large datasets with expensive and thus limited instance-level mask labels. Partially supervised instance segmentation aims to improve mask prediction with limited mask labels by utilizing the more abundant weak box labels. In this work, we show that a class agnostic mask head, commonly used in partially supervised instance segmentation, has difficulties learning a general concept of foreground for the weakly annotated classes using box supervision only. To resolve this problem we introduce an object mask prior (OMP) that provides the mask head with the gen…
Research MVTec Software GmbH（MVTec软件公司（Research MVTec Software GmbH））；Munich, Germany（德国慕尼黑（此处仅为地址信息，不应提取为机构，原文本中机构粒度已满足，地址部分按要求忽略））
State-of-the-art instance-aware semantic segmentation algorithms use axis-aligned bounding boxes as an intermediate processing step to infer the final instance mask output. This often leads to coarse and inaccurate mask proposals due to the following reasons: Axis-aligned boxes have a high background to foreground pixel-ratio, there is a strong variation of mask targets with respect to the underlying box, and neighboring instances frequently reach into the axis-aligned bounding box of the instance mask of interest. In this work, we overcome these problems by proposing to use oriented boxes as …
This paper presents Mask-aware Intersection-over-Union (maIoU) for assigning anchor boxes as positives and negatives during training of instance segmentation methods. Unlike conventional IoU or its variants, which only considers the proximity of two boxes; maIoU consistently measures the proximity of an anchor box with not only a ground truth box but also its associated ground truth mask. Thus, additionally considering the mask, which, in fact, represents the shape of the object, maIoU enables a more accurate supervision during training. We present the effectiveness of maIoU on a state-of-the-…
Synthetic Instance Segmentation from Semantic Image Segmentation Masks
Nanjing Forestry University（南京林业大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Chinese Academy of Forestry（中国林业科学研究院）
Referring image segmentation aims to segment the image region of interest according to the given language expression, which is a typical multi-modal task. Existing methods either adopt the pixel classification-based or the learnable query-based framework for mask generation, both of which are insufficient to deal with various text-image pairs with a fix number of parametric prototypes. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework built on transformer to perform Linguistic query-Guided mask generation, dubbed LGFormer. It views the linguistic features as query to generate a specialized prot…
MINES ParisTech（巴黎矿业学院）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）
Image segmentation is the process of partitioning an image into a set of meaningful regions according to some criteria. Hierarchical segmentation has emerged as a major trend in this regard as it favors the emergence of important regions at different scales. On the other hand, many methods allow us to have prior information on the position of structures of interest in the images. In this paper, we present a versatile hierarchical segmentation method that takes into account any prior spatial information and outputs a hierarchical segmentation that emphasizes the contours or regions of interest …
Domain adaptive panoptic segmentation aims to mitigate data annotation challenge by leveraging off-the-shelf annotated data in one or multiple related source domains. However, existing studies employ two separate networks for instance segmentation and semantic segmentation which lead to excessive network parameters as well as complicated and computationally intensive training and inference processes. We design UniDAformer, a unified domain adaptive panoptic segmentation transformer that is simple but can achieve domain adaptive instance segmentation and semantic segmentation simultaneously wit…
We present a high-performance method that can achieve mask-level instance segmentation with only bounding-box annotations for training. While this setting has been studied in the literature, here we show significantly stronger performance with a simple design (e.g., dramatically improving previous best reported mask AP of 21.1% in Hsu et al. (2019) to 31.6% on the COCO dataset). Our core idea is to redesign the loss of learning masks in instance segmentation, with no modification to the segmentation network itself. The new loss functions can supervise the mask training without relying on mask …
