No Arabic abstract
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.
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.
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 the model to learn new concepts which is directly implemented by retraining. Prototype fusion is firstly proposed which fuses support prototypes with query prototypes, incorporating the knowledge from both sides. It is effective in prototype refinement without importing extra learnable parameters. In this way, the prototypes become more discriminative in low-data regimes. Experiments on PASAL-$5^i$ and COCO-$20^i$ demonstrate the superiority of our method. Especially on COCO-$20^i$, PRNet significantly outperforms existing methods by a large margin of 13.1% in 1-shot setting.
Few-shot segmentation aims at assigning a category label to each image pixel with few annotated samples. It is a challenging task since the dense prediction can only be achieved under the guidance of latent features defined by sparse annotations. Existing meta-learning method tends to fail in generating category-specifically discriminative descriptor when the visual features extracted from support images are marginalized in embedding space. To address this issue, this paper presents an adaptive tuning framework, in which the distribution of latent features across different episodes is dynamically adjusted based on a self-segmentation scheme, augmenting category-specific descriptors for label prediction. Specifically, a novel self-supervised inner-loop is firstly devised as the base learner to extract the underlying semantic features from the support image. Then, gradient maps are calculated by back-propagating self-supervised loss through the obtained features, and leveraged as guidance for augmenting the corresponding elements in embedding space. Finally, with the ability to continuously learn from different episodes, an optimization-based meta-learner is adopted as outer loop of our proposed framework to gradually refine the segmentation results. Extensive experiments on benchmark PASCAL-$5^{i}$ and COCO-$20^{i}$ datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art.
Few-shot segmentation is a challenging task, requiring the extraction of a generalizable representation from only a few annotated samples, in order to segment novel query images. A common approach is to model each class with a single prototype. While conceptually simple, these methods suffer when the target appearance distribution is multi-modal or not linearly separable in feature space. To tackle this issue, we propose a few-shot learner formulation based on Gaussian process (GP) regression. Through the expressivity of the GP, our approach is capable of modeling complex appearance distributions in the deep feature space. The GP provides a principled way of capturing uncertainty, which serves as another powerful cue for the final segmentation, obtained by a CNN decoder. We further exploit the end-to-end learning capabilities of our approach to learn the output space of the GP learner, ensuring a richer encoding of the segmentation mask. We perform comprehensive experimental analysis of our few-shot learner formulation. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art for 5-shot segmentation, with mIoU scores of 68.1 and 49.8 on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i, respectively
Over the past few years, state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms are based on deep convolutional neural networks. To render a deep network with the ability to understand a concept, humans need to collect a large amount of pixel-level annotated data to train the models, which is time-consuming and tedious. Recently, few-shot segmentation is proposed to solve this problem. Few-shot segmentation aims to learn a segmentation model that can be generalized to novel classes with only a few training images. In this paper, we propose a cross-reference network (CRNet) for few-shot segmentation. Unlike previous works which only predict the mask in the query image, our proposed model concurrently make predictions for both the support image and the query image. With a cross-reference mechanism, our network can better find the co-occurrent objects in the two images, thus helping the few-shot segmentation task. We also develop a mask refinement module to recurrently refine the prediction of the foreground regions. For the $k$-shot learning, we propose to finetune parts of networks to take advantage of multiple labeled support images. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset show that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance.