The Significance of Semantic Segmentation in Computer Vision
Semantic segmentation is a computer vision task that aims to assign a class or object to each pixel in an image. This dense pixel-by-pixel segmentation map is crucial for various applications such as image manipulation, medical imaging, and autonomous driving. Unlike supervised semantic segmentation, where a target dataset with known categories is provided, zero-shot segmentation for images with unknown categories is more challenging.
A Breakthrough in Universal Segmentation
A recent popular work called SAM has achieved a remarkable zero-shot transfer to any images by training a neural network with 1.1B segmentation annotations. This breakthrough allows segmentation to be used as a building block for different tasks, without being limited to a specific dataset with predefined labels. However, collecting labels for every pixel can be expensive. That’s why unsupervised and zero-shot segmentation techniques are of significant interest, as they explore segmentation in unconstrained situations without annotations or prior knowledge of the target.
The Power of Stable Diffusion Model
Researchers from Google and Georgia Tech propose leveraging a stable diffusion (SD) model to create a universal segmentation model. Stable diffusion models have recently been used to generate high-resolution images with optimal prompting. The team introduces DiffSeg, a straightforward and effective post-processing method for creating segmentation masks. It utilizes self-attention layers in a diffusion model to produce attention tensors, and then performs attention aggregation, iterative attention merging, and non-maximal suppression to generate high-quality segmentation masks. DiffSeg is a deterministic alternative to common clustering-based unsupervised segmentation algorithms, as it does not require the input of the number of clusters.
DiffSeg achieves better results on both COCO-Stuff-27 and Cityscapes datasets compared to previous efforts, despite using fewer auxiliary data. It improves pixel accuracy by 26% and mean IoU by 17% on COCO-Stuff-27, a widely-used dataset for unsupervised segmentation.
Want to Learn More?
Check out the paper for detailed information on this research. All credit goes to the researchers who worked on this project.
Also, don’t forget to join our community:
If you enjoy our work, you’ll love our newsletter! Subscribe here for the latest AI research news and cool AI projects.