No Arabic abstract
Few-shot segmentation aims to train a segmentation model that can fast adapt to novel classes with few exemplars. The conventional training paradigm is to learn to make predictions on query images conditioned on the features from support images. Previous methods only utilized the semantic-level prototypes of support images as the conditional information. These methods cannot utilize all pixel-wise support information for the query predictions, which is however critical for the segmentation task. In this paper, we focus on utilizing pixel-wise relationships between support and target images to facilitate the few-shot semantic segmentation task. We design a novel Cycle-Consistent Transformer (CyCTR) module to aggregate pixel-wise support features into query ones. CyCTR performs cross-attention between features from different images, i.e. support and query images. We observe that there may exist unexpected irrelevant pixel-level support features. Directly performing cross-attention may aggregate these features from support to query and bias the query features. Thus, we propose using a novel cycle-consistent attention mechanism to filter out possible harmful support features and encourage query features to attend to the most informative pixels from support images. Experiments on all few-shot segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed CyCTR leads to remarkable improvement compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, on Pascal-$5^i$ and COCO-$20^i$ datasets, we achieve 66.6% and 45.6% mIoU for 5-shot segmentation, outperforming previous state-of-the-art by 4.6% and 7.1% respectively.
A few-shot semantic segmentation model is typically composed of a CNN encoder, a CNN decoder and a simple classifier (separating foreground and background pixels). Most existing methods meta-learn all three model components for fast adaptation to a new class. However, given that as few as a single support set image is available, effective model adaption of all three components to the new class is extremely challenging. In this work we propose to simplify the meta-learning task by focusing solely on the simplest component, the classifier, whilst leaving the encoder and decoder to pre-training. We hypothesize that if we pre-train an off-the-shelf segmentation model over a set of diverse training classes with sufficient annotations, the encoder and decoder can capture rich discriminative features applicable for any unseen classes, rendering the subsequent meta-learning stage unnecessary. For the classifier meta-learning, we introduce a Classifier Weight Transformer (CWT) designed to dynamically adapt the supportset trained classifiers weights to each query image in an inductive way. Extensive experiments on two standard benchmarks show that despite its simplicity, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives, often by a large margin.Code is available on https://github.com/zhiheLu/CWT-for-FSS.
Reducing the amount of supervision required by neural networks is especially important in the context of semantic segmentation, where collecting dense pixel-level annotations is particularly expensive. In this paper, we address this problem from a new perspective: Incremental Few-Shot Segmentation. In particular, given a pretrained segmentation model and few images containing novel classes, our goal is to learn to segment novel classes while retaining the ability to segment previously seen ones. In this context, we discover, against all beliefs, that fine-tuning the whole architecture with these few images is not only meaningful, but also very effective. We show how the main problems of end-to-end training in this scenario are i) the drift of the batch-normalization statistics toward novel classes that we can fix with batch renormalization and ii) the forgetting of old classes, that we can fix with regularization strategies. We summarize our findings with five guidelines that together consistently lead to the state of the art on the COCO and Pascal-VOC 2012 datasets, with different number of images per class and even with multiple learning episodes.
The application of deep learning to medical image segmentation has been hampered due to the lack of abundant pixel-level annotated data. Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) is a promising strategy for breaking the deadlock. However, a high-performing FSS model still requires sufficient pixel-level annotated classes for training to avoid overfitting, which leads to its performance bottleneck in medical image segmentation due to the unmet need for annotations. Thus, semi-supervised FSS for medical images is accordingly proposed to utilize unlabeled data for further performance improvement. Nevertheless, existing semi-supervised FSS methods has two obvious defects: (1) neglecting the relationship between the labeled and unlabeled data; (2) using unlabeled data directly for end-to-end training leads to degenerated representation learning. To address these problems, we propose a novel semi-supervised FSS framework for medical image segmentation. The proposed framework employs Poisson learning for modeling data relationship and propagating supervision signals, and Spatial Consistency Calibration for encouraging the model to learn more coherent representations. In this process, unlabeled samples do not involve in end-to-end training, but provide supervisory information for query image segmentation through graph-based learning. We conduct extensive experiments on three medical image segmentation datasets (i.e. ISIC skin lesion segmentation, abdominal organs segmentation for MRI and abdominal organs segmentation for CT) to demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and broad applicability of the proposed framework.
Few-shot semantic segmentation models aim to segment images after learning from only a few annotated examples. A key challenge for them is overfitting. Prior works usually limit the overall model capacity to alleviate overfitting, but the limited capacity also hampers the segmentation accuracy. We instead propose a method that increases the overall model capacity by supplementing class-specific features with objectness, which is class-agnostic and so not prone to overfitting. Extensive experiments demonstrate the versatility of our method with multiple backbone models (ResNet-50, ResNet-101 and HRNetV2-W48) and existing base architectures (DENet and PFENet). Given only one annotated example of an unseen category, experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-art methods with respect to mIoU by at least 4.7% and 1.5% on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i respectively.
Few-shot semantic segmentation aims at learning to segment a target object from a query image using only a few annotated support images of the target class. This challenging task requires to understand diverse levels of visual cues and analyze fine-grained correspondence relations between the query and the support images. To address the problem, we propose Hypercorrelation Squeeze Networks (HSNet) that leverages multi-level feature correlation and efficient 4D convolutions. It extracts diverse features from different levels of intermediate convolutional layers and constructs a collection of 4D correlation tensors, i.e., hypercorrelations. Using efficient center-pivot 4D convolutions in a pyramidal architecture, the method gradually squeezes high-level semantic and low-level geometric cues of the hypercorrelation into precise segmentation masks in coarse-to-fine manner. The significant performance improvements on standard few-shot segmentation benchmarks of PASCAL-5i, COCO-20i, and FSS-1000 verify the efficacy of the proposed method.