Given a single labeled example, in-context segmentation aims to segment corresponding objects. This setting, known as one-shot segmentation in few-shot learning, explores the segmentation model's generalization ability and has been applied to various vision tasks, including scene understanding and image/video editing. While recent Segment Anything Models have achieved state-of-the-art results in interactive segmentation, these approaches are not directly applicable to in-context segmentation. In this work, we propose the Dual Consistency SAM (DC-SAM) method based on prompt-tuning to adapt SAM and SAM2 for in-context segmentation of both images and videos. Our key insights are to enhance the features of the SAM's prompt encoder in segmentation by providing high-quality visual prompts. When generating a mask prior, we fuse the SAM features to better align the prompt encoder. Then, we design a cycle-consistent cross-attention on fused features and initial visual prompts. Next, a dual-branch design is provided by using the discriminative positive and negative prompts in the prompt encoder. Furthermore, we design a simple mask-tube training strategy to adopt our proposed dual consistency method into the mask tube. Although the proposed DC-SAM is primarily designed for images, it can be seamlessly extended to the video domain with the support of SAM2. Given the absence of in-context segmentation in the video domain, we manually curate and construct the first benchmark from existing video segmentation datasets, named In-Context Video Object Segmentation (IC-VOS), to better assess the in-context capability of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 55.5 (+1.4) mIoU on COCO-20i, 73.0 (+1.1) mIoU on PASCAL-5i, and a J&F score of 71.52 on the proposed IC-VOS benchmark. Our source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/zaplm/DC-SAM.
Infrared small target sequences exhibit strong similarities between frames and contain rich contextual information, which motivates us to achieve sequential infrared small target segmentation (IRSTS) with minimal data. Inspired by the success of Segment Anything Model (SAM) across various downstream tasks, we propose a one-shot and training-free method that perfectly adapts SAM's zero-shot generalization capability to sequential IRSTS. Specifically, we first obtain a confidence map through local feature matching (LFM). The highest point in the confidence map is used as the prompt to replace the manual prompt. Then, to address the over-segmentation issue caused by the domain gap, we design the point prompt-centric focusing (PPCF) module. Subsequently, to prevent miss and false detections, we introduce the triple-level ensemble (TLE) module to produce the final mask. Experiments demonstrate that our method requires only one shot to achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art IRSTS methods and significantly outperforms other one-shot segmentation methods. Moreover, ablation studies confirm the robustness of our method in the type of annotations and the selection of reference images.
This paper introduces a novel approach that combines unsupervised active contour models with deep learning for robust and adaptive image segmentation. Indeed, traditional active contours, provide a flexible framework for contour evolution and learning offers the capacity to learn intricate features and patterns directly from raw data. Our proposed methodology leverages the strengths of both paradigms, presenting a framework for both unsupervised and one-shot approaches for image segmentation. It is capable of capturing complex object boundaries without the need for extensive labeled training data. This is particularly required in histology, a field facing a significant shortage of annotations due to the challenging and time-consuming nature of the annotation process. We illustrate and compare our results to state of the art methods on a histology dataset and show significant improvements.
Adversarial learning helps generative models translate MRI from source to target sequence when lacking paired samples. However, implementing MRI synthesis with adversarial learning in clinical settings is challenging due to training instability and mode collapse. To address this issue, we leverage intermediate sequences to estimate the common latent space among multi-sequence MRI, enabling the reconstruction of distinct sequences from the common latent space. We propose a generative model that compresses discrete representations of each sequence to estimate the Gaussian distribution of vector-quantized common (VQC) latent space between multiple sequences. Moreover, we improve the latent space consistency with contrastive learning and increase model stability by domain augmentation. Experiments using BraTS2021 dataset show that our non-adversarial model outperforms other GAN-based methods, and VQC latent space aids our model to achieve (1) anti-interference ability, which can eliminate the effects of noise, bias fields, and artifacts, and (2) solid semantic representation ability, with the potential of one-shot segmentation. Our code is publicly available.
In-context segmentation aims at segmenting novel images using a few labeled example images, termed as "in-context examples", exploring content similarities between examples and the target. The resulting models can be generalized seamlessly to novel segmentation tasks, significantly reducing the labeling and training costs compared with conventional pipelines. However, in-context segmentation is more challenging than classic ones requiring the model to learn segmentation rules conditioned on a few samples. Unlike previous work with ad-hoc or non-end-to-end designs, we propose SEGIC, an end-to-end segment-in-context framework built upon a single vision foundation model (VFM). In particular, SEGIC leverages the emergent correspondence within VFM to capture dense relationships between target images and in-context samples. As such, information from in-context samples is then extracted into three types of instructions, i.e. geometric, visual, and meta instructions, serving as explicit conditions for the final mask prediction. SEGIC is a straightforward yet effective approach that yields state-of-the-art performance on one-shot segmentation benchmarks. Notably, SEGIC can be easily generalized to diverse tasks, including video object segmentation and open-vocabulary segmentation. Code will be available at https://github.com/MengLcool/SEGIC.
Accurate automatic segmentation of medical images typically requires large datasets with high-quality annotations, making it less applicable in clinical settings due to limited training data. One-shot segmentation based on learned transformations (OSSLT) has shown promise when labeled data is extremely limited, typically including unsupervised deformable registration, data augmentation with learned registration, and segmentation learned from augmented data. However, current one-shot segmentation methods are challenged by limited data diversity during augmentation, and potential label errors caused by imperfect registration. To address these issues, we propose a novel one-shot medical image segmentation method with adversarial training and label error rectification (AdLER), with the aim of improving the diversity of generated data and correcting label errors to enhance segmentation performance. Specifically, we implement a novel dual consistency constraint to ensure anatomy-aligned registration that lessens registration errors. Furthermore, we develop an adversarial training strategy to augment the atlas image, which ensures both generation diversity and segmentation robustness. We also propose to rectify potential label errors in the augmented atlas images by estimating segmentation uncertainty, which can compensate for the imperfect nature of deformable registration and improve segmentation authenticity. Experiments on the CANDI and ABIDE datasets demonstrate that the proposed AdLER outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 0.7% (CANDI), 3.6% (ABIDE "seen"), and 4.9% (ABIDE "unseen") in segmentation based on Dice scores, respectively. The source code will be available at https://github.com/hsiangyuzhao/AdLER.
Semantic segmentation of microscopic cell images using deep learning is an important technique, however, it requires a large number of images and ground truth labels for training. To address the above problem, we consider an efficient learning framework with as little data as possible, and we propose two types of learning strategies: One-shot segmentation which can learn with only one training sample, and Partially-supervised segmentation which assigns annotations to only a part of images. Furthermore, we introduce novel segmentation methods using the small prompt images inspired by prompt learning in recent studies. Our proposed methods use a pre-trained model based on only cell images and teach the information of the prompt pairs to the target image to be segmented by the attention mechanism, which allows for efficient learning while reducing the burden of annotation costs. Through experiments conducted on three types of microscopic cell image datasets, we confirmed that the proposed method improved the Dice score coefficient (DSC) in comparison with the conventional methods.
Deep learning based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance for automated white matter (WM) tract segmentation. In these methods, the segmentation model needs to be trained with a large number of manually annotated scans, which can be accumulated throughout time. When novel WM tracts, i.e., tracts not included in the existing annotated WM tracts, are to be segmented, additional annotations of these novel WM tracts need to be collected. Since tract annotation is time-consuming and costly, it is desirable to make only a few annotations of novel WM tracts for training the segmentation model, and previous work has addressed this problem by transferring the knowledge learned for segmenting existing WM tracts to the segmentation of novel WM tracts. However, accurate segmentation of novel WM tracts can still be challenging in the one-shot setting, where only one scan is annotated for the novel WM tracts. In this work, we explore the problem of one-shot segmentation of novel WM tracts. Since in the one-shot setting the annotated training data is extremely scarce, based on the existing knowledge transfer framework, we propose to further perform extensive data augmentation for the single annotated scan, where synthetic annotated training data is produced. We have designed several different strategies that mask out regions in the single annotated scan for data augmentation. Our method was evaluated on public and in-house datasets. The experimental results show that our method improves the accuracy of one-shot segmentation of novel WM tracts.
We propose a framework for the automatic one-shot segmentation of synthetic images generated by a StyleGAN. Our framework is based on the observation that the multi-scale hidden features in the GAN generator hold useful semantic information that can be utilized for automatic on-the-fly segmentation of the generated images. Using these features, our framework learns to segment synthetic images using a self-supervised contrastive clustering algorithm that projects the hidden features into a compact space for per-pixel classification. This contrastive learner is based on using a novel data augmentation strategy and a pixel-wise swapped prediction loss that leads to faster learning of the feature vectors for one-shot segmentation. We have tested our implementation on five standard benchmarks to yield a segmentation performance that not only outperforms the semi-supervised baselines by an average wIoU margin of 1.02 % but also improves the inference speeds by a factor of 4.5. Finally, we also show the results of using the proposed one-shot learner in implementing BagGAN, a framework for producing annotated synthetic baggage X-ray scans for threat detection. This framework was trained and tested on the PIDRay baggage benchmark to yield a performance comparable to its baseline segmenter based on manual annotations.
One-shot segmentation of brain tissues is typically a dual-model iterative learning: a registration model (reg-model) warps a carefully-labeled atlas onto unlabeled images to initialize their pseudo masks for training a segmentation model (seg-model); the seg-model revises the pseudo masks to enhance the reg-model for a better warping in the next iteration. However, there is a key weakness in such dual-model iteration that the spatial misalignment inevitably caused by the reg-model could misguide the seg-model, which makes it converge on an inferior segmentation performance eventually. In this paper, we propose a novel image-aligned style transformation to reinforce the dual-model iterative learning for robust one-shot segmentation of brain tissues. Specifically, we first utilize the reg-model to warp the atlas onto an unlabeled image, and then employ the Fourier-based amplitude exchange with perturbation to transplant the style of the unlabeled image into the aligned atlas. This allows the subsequent seg-model to learn on the aligned and style-transferred copies of the atlas instead of unlabeled images, which naturally guarantees the correct spatial correspondence of an image-mask training pair, without sacrificing the diversity of intensity patterns carried by the unlabeled images. Furthermore, we introduce a feature-aware content consistency in addition to the image-level similarity to constrain the reg-model for a promising initialization, which avoids the collapse of image-aligned style transformation in the first iteration. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate 1) a competitive segmentation performance of our method compared to the fully-supervised method, and 2) a superior performance over other state-of-the-art with an increase of average Dice by up to 4.67%. The source code is available at: https://github.com/JinxLv/One-shot-segmentation-via-IST.
Joint synthesis of images and segmentation masks with generative adversarial networks (GANs) is promising to reduce the effort needed for collecting image data with pixel-wise annotations. However, to learn high-fidelity image-mask synthesis, existing GAN approaches first need a pre-training phase requiring large amounts of image data, which limits their utilization in restricted image domains. In this work, we take a step to reduce this limitation, introducing the task of one-shot image-mask synthesis. We aim to generate diverse images and their segmentation masks given only a single labelled example, and assuming, contrary to previous models, no access to any pre-training data. To this end, inspired by the recent architectural developments of single-image GANs, we introduce our OSMIS model which enables the synthesis of segmentation masks that are precisely aligned to the generated images in the one-shot regime. Besides achieving the high fidelity of generated masks, OSMIS outperforms state-of-the-art single-image GAN models in image synthesis quality and diversity. In addition, despite not using any additional data, OSMIS demonstrates an impressive ability to serve as a source of useful data augmentation for one-shot segmentation applications, providing performance gains that are complementary to standard data augmentation techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/ boschresearch/one-shot-synthesis
In this work, we tackle one-shot visual search of object parts. Given a single reference image of an object with annotated affordance regions, we segment semantically corresponding parts within a target scene. We propose AffCorrs, an unsupervised model that combines the properties of pre-trained DINO-ViT's image descriptors and cyclic correspondences. We use AffCorrs to find corresponding affordances both for intra- and inter-class one-shot part segmentation. This task is more difficult than supervised alternatives, but enables future work such as learning affordances via imitation and assisted teleoperation.
Recent self-supervised advances in medical computer vision exploit global and local anatomical self-similarity for pretraining prior to downstream tasks such as segmentation. However, current methods assume i.i.d. image acquisition, which is invalid in clinical study designs where follow-up longitudinal scans track subject-specific temporal changes. Further, existing self-supervised methods for medically-relevant image-to-image architectures exploit only spatial or temporal self-similarity and only do so via a loss applied at a single image-scale, with naive multi-scale spatiotemporal extensions collapsing to degenerate solutions. To these ends, this paper makes two contributions: (1) It presents a local and multi-scale spatiotemporal representation learning method for image-to-image architectures trained on longitudinal images. It exploits the spatiotemporal self-similarity of learned multi-scale intra-subject features for pretraining and develops several feature-wise regularizations that avoid collapsed identity representations; (2) During finetuning, it proposes a surprisingly simple self-supervised segmentation consistency regularization to exploit intra-subject correlation. Benchmarked in the one-shot segmentation setting, the proposed framework outperforms both well-tuned randomly-initialized baselines and current self-supervised techniques designed for both i.i.d. and longitudinal datasets. These improvements are demonstrated across both longitudinal neurodegenerative adult MRI and developing infant brain MRI and yield both higher performance and longitudinal consistency.
Image segmentation is usually addressed by training a model for a fixed set of object classes. Incorporating additional classes or more complex queries later is expensive as it requires re-training the model on a dataset that encompasses these expressions. Here we propose a system that can generate image segmentations based on arbitrary prompts at test time. A prompt can be either a text or an image. This approach enables us to create a unified model (trained once) for three common segmentation tasks, which come with distinct challenges: referring expression segmentation, zero-shot segmentation and one-shot segmentation. We build upon the CLIP model as a backbone which we extend with a transformer-based decoder that enables dense prediction. After training on an extended version of the PhraseCut dataset, our system generates a binary segmentation map for an image based on a free-text prompt or on an additional image expressing the query. We analyze different variants of the latter image-based prompts in detail. This novel hybrid input allows for dynamic adaptation not only to the three segmentation tasks mentioned above, but to any binary segmentation task where a text or image query can be formulated. Finally, we find our system to adapt well to generalized queries involving affordances or properties. Code is available at https://eckerlab.org/code/clipseg.
Deep neural networks usually require accurate and a large number of annotations to achieve outstanding performance in medical image segmentation. One-shot segmentation and weakly-supervised learning are promising research directions that lower labeling effort by learning a new class from only one annotated image and utilizing coarse labels instead, respectively. Previous works usually fail to leverage the anatomical structure and suffer from class imbalance and low contrast problems. Hence, we present an innovative framework for 3D medical image segmentation with one-shot and weakly-supervised settings. Firstly a propagation-reconstruction network is proposed to project scribbles from annotated volume to unlabeled 3D images based on the assumption that anatomical patterns in different human bodies are similar. Then a dual-level feature denoising module is designed to refine the scribbles based on anatomical- and pixel-level features. After expanding the scribbles to pseudo masks, we could train a segmentation model for the new class with the noisy label training strategy. Experiments on one abdomen and one head-and-neck CT dataset show the proposed method obtains significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods and performs robustly even under severe class imbalance and low contrast.
Previous human parsing methods are limited to parsing humans into pre-defined classes, which is inflexible for practical fashion applications that often have new fashion item classes. In this paper, we define a novel one-shot human parsing (OSHP) task that requires parsing humans into an open set of classes defined by any test example. During training, only base classes are exposed, which only overlap with part of the test-time classes. To address three main challenges in OSHP, i.e., small sizes, testing bias, and similar parts, we devise an End-to-end One-shot human Parsing Network (EOP-Net). Firstly, an end-to-end human parsing framework is proposed to parse the query image into both coarse-grained and fine-grained human classes, which embeds rich semantic information that is shared across different granularities to identify the small-sized human classes. Then, we gradually smooth the training-time static prototypes to get robust class representations. Moreover, we employ a dynamic objective to encourage the network's enhancing features' representational capability in the early training phase while improving features' transferability in the late training phase. Therefore, our method can quickly adapt to the novel classes and mitigate the testing bias issue. In addition, we add a contrastive loss at the prototype level to enforce inter-class distances, thereby discriminating the similar parts. For comprehensive evaluations on the new task, we tailor three existing popular human parsing benchmarks to the OSHP task. Experiments demonstrate that EOP-Net outperforms representative one-shot segmentation models by large margins and serves as a strong baseline for further research. The source code is available at https://github.com/Charleshhy/One-shot-Human-Parsing.
Prior human parsing models are limited to parsing humans into classes pre-defined in the training data, which is not flexible to generalize to unseen classes, e.g., new clothing in fashion analysis. In this paper, we propose a new problem named one-shot human parsing (OSHP) that requires to parse human into an open set of reference classes defined by any single reference example. During training, only base classes defined in the training set are exposed, which can overlap with part of reference classes. In this paper, we devise a novel Progressive One-shot Parsing network (POPNet) to address two critical challenges , i.e., testing bias and small sizes. POPNet consists of two collaborative metric learning modules named Attention Guidance Module and Nearest Centroid Module, which can learn representative prototypes for base classes and quickly transfer the ability to unseen classes during testing, thereby reducing testing bias. Moreover, POPNet adopts a progressive human parsing framework that can incorporate the learned knowledge of parent classes at the coarse granularity to help recognize the descendant classes at the fine granularity, thereby handling the small sizes issue. Experiments on the ATR-OS benchmark tailored for OSHP demonstrate POPNet outperforms other representative one-shot segmentation models by large margins and establishes a strong baseline. Source code can be found at https://github.com/Charleshhy/One-shot-Human-Parsing.
Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures is vital for medical image analysis. The state-of-the-art accuracy is typically achieved by supervised learning methods, where gathering the requisite expert-labeled image annotations in a scalable manner remains a main obstacle. Therefore, annotation-efficient methods that permit to produce accurate anatomical structure segmentation are highly desirable. In this work, we present Contour Transformer Network (CTN), a one-shot anatomy segmentation method with a naturally built-in human-in-the-loop mechanism. We formulate anatomy segmentation as a contour evolution process and model the evolution behavior by graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Training the CTN model requires only one labeled image exemplar and leverages additional unlabeled data through newly introduced loss functions that measure the global shape and appearance consistency of contours. On segmentation tasks of four different anatomies, we demonstrate that our one-shot learning method significantly outperforms non-learning-based methods and performs competitively to the state-of-the-art fully supervised deep learning methods. With minimal human-in-the-loop editing feedback, the segmentation performance can be further improved to surpass the fully supervised methods.
Few-shot segmentation focuses on the generalization of models to segment unseen object instances with limited training samples. Although tremendous improvements have been achieved, existing methods are still constrained by two factors. (1) The information interaction between query and support images is not adequate, leaving intra-class gap. (2) The object categories at the training and inference stages have no overlap, leaving the inter-class gap. Thus, we propose a framework, BriNet, to bridge these gaps. First, more information interactions are encouraged between the extracted features of the query and support images, i.e., using an Information Exchange Module to emphasize the common objects. Furthermore, to precisely localize the query objects, we design a multi-path fine-grained strategy which is able to make better use of the support feature representations. Second, a new online refinement strategy is proposed to help the trained model adapt to unseen classes, achieved by switching the roles of the query and the support images at the inference stage. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated by experimental results, which outperforms other competitive methods and leads to a new state-of-the-art on both PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO dataset.
Low-shot learning methods for image classification support learning from sparse data. We extend these techniques to support dense semantic image segmentation. Specifically, we train a network that, given a small set of annotated images, produces parameters for a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN). We use this FCN to perform dense pixel-level prediction on a test image for the new semantic class. Our architecture shows a 25% relative meanIoU improvement compared to the best baseline methods for one-shot segmentation on unseen classes in the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset and is at least 3 times faster.