Unsupervised video object segmentation has made significant progress in recent years, but the manual annotation of video mask datasets is expensive and limits the diversity of available datasets. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has introduced a new prompt-driven paradigm for image segmentation, unlocking a range of previously unexplored capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm called UVOSAM, which leverages SAM for unsupervised video object segmentation without requiring video mask labels. To address SAM's limitations in instance discovery and identity association, we introduce a video salient object tracking network that automatically generates trajectories for prominent foreground objects. These trajectories then serve as prompts for SAM to produce video masks on a frame-by-frame basis. Our experimental results demonstrate that UVOSAM significantly outperforms current mask-supervised methods. These findings suggest that UVOSAM has the potential to improve unsupervised video object segmentation and reduce the cost of manual annotation.
Although unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a promising direction to alleviate domain shift, they fall short of their supervised counterparts. In this work, we investigate relatively less explored semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) for medical image segmentation, where access to a few labeled target samples can improve the adaptation performance substantially. Specifically, we propose a two-stage training process. First, an encoder is pre-trained in a self-learning paradigm using a novel domain-content disentangled contrastive learning (CL) along with a pixel-level feature consistency constraint. The proposed CL enforces the encoder to learn discriminative content-specific but domain-invariant semantics on a global scale from the source and target images, whereas consistency regularization enforces the mining of local pixel-level information by maintaining spatial sensitivity. This pre-trained encoder, along with a decoder, is further fine-tuned for the downstream task, (i.e. pixel-level segmentation) using a semi-supervised setting. Furthermore, we experimentally validate that our proposed method can easily be extended for UDA settings, adding to the superiority of the proposed strategy. Upon evaluation on two domain adaptive image segmentation tasks, our proposed method outperforms the SoTA methods, both in SSDA and UDA settings. Code is available at //github.com/hritam-98/GFDA-disentangled
The paradigm of self-supervision focuses on representation learning from raw data without the need of labor-consuming annotations, which is the main bottleneck of current data-driven methods. Self-supervision tasks are often used to pre-train a neural network with a large amount of unlabeled data and extract generic features of the dataset. The learned model is likely to contain useful information which can be transferred to the downstream main task and improve performance compared to random parameter initialization. In this paper, we propose a new self-supervision task called source identification (SI), which is inspired by the classic blind source separation problem. Synthetic images are generated by fusing multiple source images and the network's task is to reconstruct the original images, given the fused images. A proper understanding of the image content is required to successfully solve the task. We validate our method on two medical image segmentation tasks: brain tumor segmentation and white matter hyperintensities segmentation. The results show that the proposed SI task outperforms traditional self-supervision tasks for dense predictions including inpainting, pixel shuffling, intensity shift, and super-resolution. Among variations of the SI task fusing images of different types, fusing images from different patients performs best.
In semantic segmentation, adapting a visual system to novel object categories at inference time has always been both valuable and challenging. To enable such generalization, existing methods rely on either providing several support examples as visual cues or class names as textual cues. Through the development is relatively optimistic, these two lines have been studied in isolation, neglecting the complementary intrinsic of low-level visual and high-level language information. In this paper, we define a unified setting termed as open-set semantic segmentation (O3S), which aims to learn seen and unseen semantics from both visual examples and textual names. Our pipeline extracts multi-modal prototypes for segmentation task, by first single modal self-enhancement and aggregation, then multi-modal complementary fusion. To be specific, we aggregate visual features into several tokens as visual prototypes, and enhance the class name with detailed descriptions for textual prototype generation. The two modalities are then fused to generate multi-modal prototypes for final segmentation. On both \pascal and \coco datasets, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the framework effectiveness. State-of-the-art results are achieved even on more detailed part-segmentation, Pascal-Animals, by only training on coarse-grained datasets. Thorough ablation studies are performed to dissect each component, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Existing datasets for manually labelled query-based video summarization are costly and thus small, limiting the performance of supervised deep video summarization models. Self-supervision can address the data sparsity challenge by using a pretext task and defining a method to acquire extra data with pseudo labels to pre-train a supervised deep model. In this work, we introduce segment-level pseudo labels from input videos to properly model both the relationship between a pretext task and a target task, and the implicit relationship between the pseudo label and the human-defined label. The pseudo labels are generated based on existing human-defined frame-level labels. To create more accurate query-dependent video summaries, a semantics booster is proposed to generate context-aware query representations. Furthermore, we propose mutual attention to help capture the interactive information between visual and textual modalities. Three commonly-used video summarization benchmarks are used to thoroughly validate the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the proposed video summarization algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance.
The objective of Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) is to localise the sounding objects within visual scenes by accurately predicting pixel-wise segmentation masks. To tackle the task, it involves a comprehensive consideration of both the data and model aspects. In this paper, first, we initiate a novel pipeline for generating artificial data for the AVS task without human annotating. We leverage existing image segmentation and audio datasets to match the image-mask pairs with its corresponding audio samples with the linkage of category labels, that allows us to effortlessly compose (image, audio, mask) triplets for training AVS models. The pipeline is annotation-free and scalable to cover a large number of categories. Additionally, we introduce a lightweight approach SAMA-AVS to adapt the pre-trained segment anything model~(SAM) to the AVS task. By introducing only a small number of trainable parameters with adapters, the proposed model can effectively achieve adequate audio-visual fusion and interaction in the encoding stage with vast majority of parameters fixed. We conduct extensive experiments, and the results show our proposed model remarkably surpasses other competing methods. Moreover, by using the proposed model pretrained with our synthetic data, the performance on real AVSBench data is further improved, achieving 83.17 mIoU on S4 subset and 66.95 mIoU on MS3 set.
Partially-supervised instance segmentation is a task which requests segmenting objects from novel unseen categories via learning on limited seen categories with annotated masks thus eliminating demands of heavy annotation burden. The key to addressing this task is to build an effective class-agnostic mask segmentation model. Unlike previous methods that learn such models only on seen categories, in this paper, we propose a new method, named ContrastMask, which learns a mask segmentation model on both seen and unseen categories under a unified pixel-level contrastive learning framework. In this framework, annotated masks of seen categories and pseudo masks of unseen categories serve as a prior for contrastive learning, where features from the mask regions (foreground) are pulled together, and are contrasted against those from the background, and vice versa. Through this framework, feature discrimination between foreground and background is largely improved, facilitating learning of the class-agnostic mask segmentation model. Exhaustive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method, which outperforms previous state-of-the-arts.
What matters for contrastive learning? We argue that contrastive learning heavily relies on informative features, or "hard" (positive or negative) features. Early works include more informative features by applying complex data augmentations and large batch size or memory bank, and recent works design elaborate sampling approaches to explore informative features. The key challenge toward exploring such features is that the source multi-view data is generated by applying random data augmentations, making it infeasible to always add useful information in the augmented data. Consequently, the informativeness of features learned from such augmented data is limited. In response, we propose to directly augment the features in latent space, thereby learning discriminative representations without a large amount of input data. We perform a meta learning technique to build the augmentation generator that updates its network parameters by considering the performance of the encoder. However, insufficient input data may lead the encoder to learn collapsed features and therefore malfunction the augmentation generator. A new margin-injected regularization is further added in the objective function to avoid the encoder learning a degenerate mapping. To contrast all features in one gradient back-propagation step, we adopt the proposed optimization-driven unified contrastive loss instead of the conventional contrastive loss. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets.
Video instance segmentation (VIS) is the task that requires simultaneously classifying, segmenting and tracking object instances of interest in video. Recent methods typically develop sophisticated pipelines to tackle this task. Here, we propose a new video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, termed VisTR, which views the VIS task as a direct end-to-end parallel sequence decoding/prediction problem. Given a video clip consisting of multiple image frames as input, VisTR outputs the sequence of masks for each instance in the video in order directly. At the core is a new, effective instance sequence matching and segmentation strategy, which supervises and segments instances at the sequence level as a whole. VisTR frames the instance segmentation and tracking in the same perspective of similarity learning, thus considerably simplifying the overall pipeline and is significantly different from existing approaches. Without bells and whistles, VisTR achieves the highest speed among all existing VIS models, and achieves the best result among methods using single model on the YouTube-VIS dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and faster video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, achieving competitive accuracy. We hope that VisTR can motivate future research for more video understanding tasks.
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical images in the semi-supervised setting with limited annotations, by leveraging domain-specific and problem-specific cues. Specifically, we propose (1) novel contrasting strategies that leverage structural similarity across volumetric medical images (domain-specific cue) and (2) a local version of the contrastive loss to learn distinctive representations of local regions that are useful for per-pixel segmentation (problem-specific cue). We carry out an extensive evaluation on three Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. In the limited annotation setting, the proposed method yields substantial improvements compared to other self-supervision and semi-supervised learning techniques. When combined with a simple data augmentation technique, the proposed method reaches within 8% of benchmark performance using only two labeled MRI volumes for training, corresponding to only 4% (for ACDC) of the training data used to train the benchmark.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.