Unsupervised Universal Image Segmentation

Dantong Niu, Xudong Wang, Xinyang Han, Long Lian, Roei Herzig, Trevor Darrell; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 22744-22754

Several unsupervised image segmentation approaches have been proposed which eliminate the need for dense manually-annotated segmentation masks; current models separately handle either semantic segmentation (e.g. STEGO) or class-agnostic instance segmentation (e.g. CutLER) but not both (i.e. panoptic segmentation). We propose an Unsupervised Universal Segmentation model (U2Seg) adept at performing various image segmentation tasks---instance semantic and panoptic---using a novel unified framework. U2Seg generates pseudo semantic labels for these segmentation tasks via leveraging self-supervised models followed by clustering; each cluster represents different semantic and/or instance membership of pixels. We then self-train the model on these pseudo semantic labels yielding substantial performance gains over specialized methods tailored to each task: a +2.6 APbox boost (vs. CutLER) in unsupervised instance segmentation on COCO and a +7.0 PixelAcc increase (vs. STEGO) in unsupervised semantic segmentation on COCOStuff. Moreover our method sets up a new baseline for unsupervised panoptic segmentation which has not been previously explored. U2Seg is also a strong pretrained model for few-shot segmentation surpassing CutLER by +5.0 APmask when trained on a low-data regime e.g. only 1% COCO labels. We hope our simple yet effective method can inspire more research on unsupervised universal image segmentation.