SegPrompt: Boosting Open-World Segmentation via Category-Level Prompt Learning

Muzhi Zhu, Hengtao Li, Hao Chen, Chengxiang Fan, Weian Mao, Chenchen Jing, Yifan Liu, Chunhua Shen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 999-1008

Current closed-set instance segmentation models rely on predefined class labels for each mask during training and evaluation, limiting their ability to detect novel objects. Open-world instance segmentation (OWIS) models address this challenge by detecting unknown objects in a class-agnostic manner. However, previous OWIS approaches completely erase category information during training to keep the model's ability to generalize to unknown objects. In this work, we propose a novel training mechanism called SegPrompt that utilizes category information to improve the model's class-agnostic segmentation ability for both known and unknown categories. In addition, the previous OWIS training setting exposes the unknown classes to the training set and brings information leakage, which is unreasonable in the real world. Therefore, we provide a new open-world benchmark closer to a real-world scenario by dividing the dataset classes into known-seen-unseen parts. For the first time we focus on the model's ability to discover objects that never appear in the training set images. Experiments show that SegPrompt can improve the overall and unseen detection performance by 5.6% and 6.1% in AR on our new benchmark without affecting the inference efficiency. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on existing cross-dataset transfer and strongly supervised settings, leading to 5.5% and 12.3% relative improvement.