CVPR 2024 Papers

We present a novel semantic segmentation approach for incremental nuclei segmentation from histopathological images which is a very challenging task as we have to incrementally optimize existing models to make them perform well in both old and new classes without using training samples of old classes. Yet it is an indispensable component of computer-aided diagnosis systems. The proposed approach has two key techniques. First we propose a new future-class awareness mechanism by separating some potential regions for future classes from background based on their similarities to both old and new classes in the representation space. With this mechanism we can not only reserve more parameter space for future updates but also enhance the representation capability of learned features. We further propose an innovative compatibility-inspired distillation scheme to make our model take full advantage of the knowledge learned by the old model. We conducted extensive experiments on two famous histopathological datasets and the results demonstrate the proposed approach achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/why19991/InSeg.

Recent self-supervised models produce visual features that are not only effective at encoding image-level but also pixel-level semantics. They have been reported to obtain impressive results for dense visual semantic correspondence estimation even outperforming fully-supervised methods. Nevertheless these models still fail in the presence of challenging image characteristics such as symmetries and repeated parts. To address these limitations we propose a new semantic correspondence estimation method that supplements state-of-the-art self-supervised features with 3D understanding via a weak geometric spherical prior. Compared to more involved 3D pipelines our model provides a simple and effective way of injecting informative geometric priors into the learned representation while requiring only weak viewpoint information. We also propose a new evaluation metric that better accounts for repeated part and symmetry-induced mistakes. We show that our method succeeds in distinguishing between symmetric views and repeated parts across many object categories in the challenging SPair-71k dataset and also in generalizing to previously unseen classes in the AwA dataset.

Semantic segmentation in bird's eye view (BEV) plays a crucial role in autonomous driving. Previous methods usually follow an end-to-end pipeline directly predicting the BEV segmentation map from monocular RGB inputs. However the challenge arises when the RGB inputs and BEV targets from distinct perspectives making the direct point-to-point predicting hard to optimize. In this paper we decompose the original BEV segmentation task into two stages namely BEV map reconstruction and RGB-BEV feature alignment. In the first stage we train a BEV autoencoder to reconstruct the BEV segmentation maps given corrupted noisy latent representation which urges the decoder to learn fundamental knowledge of typical BEV patterns. The second stage involves mapping RGB input images into the BEV latent space of the first stage directly optimizing the correlations between the two views at the feature level. Our approach simplifies the complexity of combining perception and generation into distinct steps equipping the model to handle intricate and challenging scenes effectively. Besides we propose to transform the BEV segmentation map from the Cartesian to the polar coordinate system to establish the column-wise correspondence between RGB images and BEV maps. Moreover our method requires neither multi-scale features nor camera intrinsic parameters for depth estimation and saves computational overhead. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse show the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/happytianhao/TaDe.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVS) aims to segment images of arbitrary categories specified by class labels or captions. However most previous best-performing methods whether pixel grouping methods or region recognition methods suffer from false matches between image features and category labels. We attribute this to the natural gap between the textual features and visual features. In this work we rethink how to mitigate false matches from the perspective of image-to-image matching and propose a novel relation-aware intra-modal matching (RIM) framework for OVS based on visual foundation models. RIM achieves robust region classification by firstly constructing diverse image-modal reference features and then matching them with region features based on relation-aware ranking distribution. The proposed RIM enjoys several merits. First the intra-modal reference features are better aligned circumventing potential ambiguities that may arise in cross-modal matching. Second the ranking-based matching process harnesses the structure information implicit in the inter-class relationships making it more robust than comparing individually. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that RIM outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by large margins obtaining a lead of more than 10% in mIoU on PASCAL VOC benchmark

This paper addresses text-supervised semantic segmentation aiming to learn a model capable of segmenting arbitrary visual concepts within images by using only image-text pairs without dense annotations. Existing methods have demonstrated that contrastive learning on image-text pairs effectively aligns visual segments with the meanings of texts. We notice that there is a discrepancy between text alignment and semantic segmentation: A text often consists of multiple semantic concepts whereas semantic segmentation strives to create semantically homogeneous segments. To address this issue we propose a novel framework Image-Text Co-Decomposition (CoDe) where the paired image and text are jointly decomposed into a set of image regions and a set of word segments respectively and contrastive learning is developed to enforce region-word alignment. To work with a vision-language model we present a prompt learning mechanism that derives an extra representation to highlight an image segment or a word segment of interest with which more effective features can be extracted from that segment. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our method performs favorably against existing text-supervised semantic segmentation methods on six benchmark datasets.

Recent weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods strive to incorporate contextual knowledge to improve the completeness of class activation maps (CAM). In this work we argue that the knowledge bias between instances and contexts affects the capability of the prototype to sufficiently understand instance semantics. Inspired by prototype learning theory we propose leveraging prototype awareness to capture diverse and fine-grained feature attributes of instances. The hypothesis is that contextual prototypes might erroneously activate similar and frequently co-occurring object categories due to this knowledge bias. Therefore we propose to enhance the prototype representation ability by mitigating the bias to better capture spatial coverage in semantic object regions. With this goal we present a Context Prototype-Aware Learning (CPAL) strategy which leverages semantic context to enrich instance comprehension. The core of this method is to accurately capture intra-class variations in object features through context-aware prototypes facilitating the adaptation to the semantic attributes of various instances. We design feature distribution alignment to optimize prototype awareness aligning instance feature distributions with dense features. In addition a unified training framework is proposed to combine label-guided classification supervision and prototypes-guided self-supervision. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 show that CPAL significantly improves off-the-shelf methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The project is available at \href https://github.com/Barrett-python/CPAL https://github.com/Barrett-python/CPAL.

Recent methods for label-free 3D semantic segmentation aim to assist 3D model training by leveraging the open-world recognition ability of pre-trained vision language models. However these methods usually suffer from inconsistent and noisy pseudo-labels provided by the vision language models. To address this issue we present a hierarchical intra-modal correlation learning framework that captures visual and geometric correlations in 3D scenes at three levels: intra-set intra-scene and inter-scene to help learn more compact 3D representations. We refine pseudo-labels using intra-set correlations within each geometric consistency set and align features of visually and geometrically similar points using intra-scene and inter-scene correlation learning. We also introduce a feedback mechanism to distill the correlation learning capability into the 3D model. Experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets show the superiority of our method. We achieve a state-of-the-art 36.6% mIoU on the ScanNet dataset and a 23.0% mIoU on the nuScenes dataset with improvements of 7.8% mIoU and 2.2% mIoU compared with previous SOTA. We also provide theoretical analysis and qualitative visualization results to discuss the mechanism and conduct thorough ablation studies to support the effectiveness of our framework.

Superpixels play a crucial role in image processing by partitioning an image into clusters of pixels with similar visual attributes. This facilitates subsequent image processing tasks offering computational advantages over the manipulation of individual pixels. While numerous oversegmentation techniques have emerged in recent years many rely on predefined initialization and termination criteria. In this paper a novel top-down superpixel segmentation algorithm called Hierarchical Histogram Threshold Segmentation (HHTS) is introduced. It eliminates the need for initialization and implements auto-termination outperforming state-of-the-art methods w.r.t boundary recall. This is achieved by iteratively partitioning individual pixel segments into foreground and background and applying intensity thresholding across multiple color channels. The underlying iterative process constructs a superpixel hierarchy that adapts to local detail distributions until color information exhaustion. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of boundary adherence while maintaining competitive runtime performance on the BSDS500 and NYUV2 datasets. Furthermore an application of HHTS in refining machine learning-based semantic segmentation masks produced by the Segment Anything Foundation Model (SAM) is presented.

Event-based semantic segmentation has gained popularity due to its capability to deal with scenarios under high-speed motion and extreme lighting conditions which cannot be addressed by conventional RGB cameras. Since it is hard to annotate event data previous approaches rely on event-to-image reconstruction to obtain pseudo labels for training. However this will inevitably introduce noise and learning from noisy pseudo labels especially when generated from a single source may reinforce the errors. This drawback is also called confirmation bias in pseudo-labeling. In this paper we propose a novel hybrid pseudo-labeling framework for unsupervised event-based semantic segmentation HPL-ESS to alleviate the influence of noisy pseudo labels. In particular we first employ a plain unsupervised domain adaptation framework as our baseline which can generate a set of pseudo labels through self-training. Then we incorporate offline event-to-image reconstruction into the framework and obtain another set of pseudo labels by predicting segmentation maps on the reconstructed images. A noisy label learning strategy is designed to mix the two sets of pseudo labels and enhance the quality. Moreover we propose a soft prototypical alignment module to further improve the consistency of target domain features. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the DSEC-Semantic dataset (+5.88% accuracy +10.32% mIoU) which even surpasses several supervised methods.

We address the challenging task of identifying segmenting and tracking hand-held objects which is crucial for applications such as human action segmentation and performance evaluation. This task is particularly challenging due to heavy occlusion rapid motion and the transitory nature of objects being hand-held where an object may be held released and subsequently picked up again. To tackle these challenges we have developed a novel transformer-based architecture called HOIST-Former. HOIST-Former is adept at spatially and temporally segmenting hands and objects by iteratively pooling features from each other ensuring that the processes of identification segmentation and tracking of hand-held objects depend on the hands' positions and their contextual appearance. We further refine HOIST-Former with a contact loss that focuses on areas where hands are in contact with objects. Moreover we also contribute an in-the-wild video dataset called HOIST which comprises 4125 videos complete with bounding boxes segmentation masks and tracking IDs for hand-held objects. Through experiments on the HOIST dataset and two additional public datasets we demonstrate the efficacy of HOIST-Former in segmenting and tracking hand-held objects.

Interactive Segmentation (IS) segments specific objects or parts in the image according to user input. Current IS pipelines fall into two categories: single-granularity output and multi-granularity output. The latter aims to alleviate the spatial ambiguity present in the former. However the multi-granularity output pipeline suffers from limited interaction flexibility and produces redundant results. In this work we introduce Granularity-Controllable Interactive Segmentation (GraCo) a novel approach that allows precise control of prediction granularity by introducing additional parameters to input. This enhances the customization of the interactive system and eliminates redundancy while resolving ambiguity. Nevertheless the exorbitant cost of annotating multi-granularity masks and the lack of available datasets with granularity annotations make it difficult for models to acquire the necessary guidance to control output granularity. To address this problem we design an any-granularity mask generator that exploits the semantic property of the pre-trained IS model to automatically generate abundant mask-granularity pairs without requiring additional manual annotation. Based on these pairs we propose a granularity-controllable learning strategy that efficiently imparts the granularity controllability to the IS model. Extensive experiments on intricate scenarios at object and part levels demonstrate that our GraCo has significant advantages over previous methods. This highlights the potential of GraCo to be a flexible annotation tool capable of adapting to diverse segmentation scenarios. The project page: https://zhao-yian.github.io/GraCo.

This paper tackles a novel yet challenging problem: how to transfer knowledge from the emerging Segment Anything Model (SAM) -- which reveals impressive zero-shot instance segmentation capacity -- to learn a compact panoramic semantic segmentation model i.e. student without requiring any labeled data. This poses considerable challenges due to SAM's inability to provide semantic labels and the large capacity gap between SAM and the student. To this end we propose a novel framework called GoodSAM that introduces a teacher assistant (TA) to provide semantic information integrated with SAM to generate ensemble logits to achieve knowledge transfer. Specifically we propose a Distortion-Aware Rectification (DAR) module that first addresses the distortion problem of panoramic images by imposing prediction-level consistency and boundary enhancement. This subtly enhances TA's prediction capacity on panoramic images. DAR then incorporates a cross-task complementary fusion block to adaptively merge the predictions of SAM and TA to obtain more reliable ensemble logits. Moreover we introduce a Multi-level Knowledge Adaptation (MKA) module to efficiently transfer the multi-level feature knowledge from TA and ensemble logits to learn a compact student model. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks show that our GoodSAM achieves a remarkable +3.75% mIoU improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) domain adaptation methods e.g. [41]. Also our most lightweight model achieves comparable performance to the SOTA methods with only 3.7M parameters.

Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES) extends the scope of classic RES to refer to multiple objects in one expression or identify the empty targets absent in the image. GRES poses challenges in modeling the complex spatial relationships of the instances in the image and identifying non-existing referents. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently shown tremendous progress in these complicated vision-language tasks. Connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision models MLLMs are proficient in understanding contexts with visual inputs. Among them LISA as a representative adopts a special [SEG] token to prompt a segmentation mask decoder e.g. SAM to enable MLLMs in the RES task. However existing solutions to GRES remain unsatisfactory since current segmentation MLLMs cannot correctly handle the cases where users might reference multiple subjects in a singular prompt or provide descriptions incongruent with any image target. In this paper we propose Generalized Segmentation Vision Assistant (GSVA) to address this gap. Specifically GSVA reuses the [SEG] token to prompt the segmentation model towards supporting multiple mask references simultaneously and innovatively learns to generate a [REJ] token to reject the targets explicitly. Experiments validate GSVA's efficacy in resolving the GRES issue marking a notable enhancement and setting a new record on the GRES benchmark gRefCOCO dataset. GSVA also proves effective across various classic referring segmentation and comprehension tasks.

Most multimodal large language models (MLLMs) learn language-to-object grounding through causal language modeling where grounded objects are captured by bounding boxes as sequences of location tokens. This paradigm lacks pixel-level representations that are important for fine-grained visual understanding and diagnosis. In this work we introduce GROUNDHOG an MLLM developed by grounding Large Language Models to holistic segmentation. GROUNDHOG incorporates a masked feature extractor and converts extracted features into visual entity tokens for the MLLM backbone which then connects groundable phrases to unified grounding masks by retrieving and merging the entity masks. To train GROUNDHOG we carefully curated M3G2 a grounded visual instruction tuning dataset with Multi-Modal Multi-Grained Grounding by harvesting a collection of segmentation-grounded datasets with rich annotations. Our experimental results show that GROUNDHOG achieves superior performance on various language grounding tasks without task-specific fine-tuning and significantly reduces object hallucination. GROUNDHOG also demonstrates better grounding towards complex forms of visual input and provides easy-to-understand diagnosis in failure cases.

As wearable cameras become more popular an important question emerges: how to identify camera wearers within the perspective of conventional static cameras. The drastic difference between first-person (egocentric) and third-person (exocentric) camera views makes this a challenging task. We present PersonEnvironmentNet (PEN) a framework designed to integrate information from both the individuals in the two views and geometric cues inferred from the background environment. To facilitate research in this direction we also present TF2023 a novel dataset comprising synchronized first-person and third-person views along with masks of camera wearers and labels associating these masks with the respective first-person views. In addition we propose a novel quantitative metric designed to measure a model's ability to comprehend the relationship between the two views. Our experiments reveal that PEN outperforms existing methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ziweizhao1993/PEN.

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation has witnessed great achievements with image-level labels. Several recent approaches use the CLIP model to generate pseudo labels for training an individual segmentation model while there is no attempt to apply the CLIP model as the backbone to directly segment objects with image-level labels. In this paper we propose WeCLIP a CLIP-based single-stage pipeline for weakly supervised semantic segmentation. Specifically the frozen CLIP model is applied as the backbone for semantic feature extraction and a new decoder is designed to interpret extracted semantic features for final prediction. Meanwhile we utilize the above frozen backbone to generate pseudo labels for training the decoder. Such labels cannot be optimized during training. We then propose a refinement module (RFM) to rectify them dynamically. Our architecture enforces the proposed decoder and RFM to benefit from each other to boost the final performance. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms other approaches with less training cost. Additionally our WeCLIP also obtains promising results for fully supervised settings. The code is available at https://github.com/zbf1991/WeCLIP.

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) aims to learn the concept of segmentation using image-level class labels. Recent WSSS works have shown promising results by using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) a foundation model for segmentation during the inference phase. However we observe that these methods can still be vulnerable to the noise of class activation maps (CAMs) serving as initial seeds. As a remedy this paper introduces From-SAM-to-CAMs (S2C) a novel WSSS framework that directly transfers the knowledge of SAM to the classifier during the training process enhancing the quality of CAMs itself. S2C comprises SAM-segment Contrasting (SSC) and a CAM-based prompting module (CPM) which exploit SAM at the feature and logit levels respectively. SSC performs prototype-based contrasting using SAM's automatic segmentation results. It constrains each feature to be close to the prototype of its segment and distant from prototypes of the others. Meanwhile CPM extracts prompts from the CAM of each class and uses them to generate class-specific segmentation masks through SAM. The masks are aggregated into unified self-supervision based on the confidence score designed to consider the reliability of both SAM and CAMs. S2C achieves a new state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks outperforming existing studies by significant margins. The code is available at https://github.com/sangrockEG/S2C.

Dilated convolution which expands the receptive field by inserting gaps between its consecutive elements is widely employed in computer vision. In this study we propose three strategies to improve individual phases of dilated convolution from the view of spectrum analysis. Departing from the conventional practice of fixing a global dilation rate as a hyperparameter we introduce Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution (FADC) which dynamically adjusts dilation rates spatially based on local frequency components. Subsequently we design two plug-in modules to directly enhance effective bandwidth and receptive field size. The Adaptive Kernel (AdaKern) module decomposes convolution weights into low-frequency and high-frequency components dynamically adjusting the ratio between these components on a per-channel basis. By increasing the high-frequency part of convolution weights AdaKern captures more high-frequency components thereby improving effective bandwidth. The Frequency Selection (FreqSelect) module optimally balances high- and low-frequency components in feature representations through spatially variant reweighting. It suppresses high frequencies in the background to encourage FADC to learn a larger dilation thereby increasing the receptive field for an expanded scope. Extensive experiments on segmentation and object detection consistently validate the efficacy of our approach. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FADC.

Instance segmentation of point clouds is a crucial task in 3D field with numerous applications that involve localizing and segmenting objects in a scene. However achieving satisfactory results requires a large number of manual annotations which is time-consuming and expensive. To alleviate dependency on annotations we propose a novel framework FreePoint for underexplored unsupervised class-agnostic instance segmentation on point clouds. In detail we represent the point features by combining coordinates colors and self-supervised deep features. Based on the point features we perform a bottom-up multicut algorithm to segment point clouds into coarse instance masks as pseudo labels which are used to train a point cloud instance segmentation model. We propose an id-as-feature strategy at this stage to alleviate the randomness of the multicut algorithm and improve the pseudo labels' quality. During training we propose a weakly-supervised two-step training strategy and corresponding losses to overcome the inaccuracy of coarse masks. FreePoint has achieved breakthroughs in unsupervised class-agnostic instance segmentation on point clouds and outperformed previous traditional methods by over 18.2% and a competitive concurrent work UnScene3D by 5.5% in AP. Additionally when used as a pretext task and fine-tuned on S3DIS FreePoint performs significantly better than existing self-supervised pre-training methods with limited annotations and surpasses CSC by 6.0% in AP with 10% annotation masks. Code will be released at https://github.com/zzk273/FreePoint.