VidSeg: Training-free Video Semantic Segmentation based on Diffusion Models

Qian Wang, Abdelrahman Eldesokey, Mohit Mendiratta, Fangneng Zhan, Adam Kortylewski, Christian Theobalt, Peter Wonka; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 22985-22994

We introduce the first training-free approach for Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS) based on pre-trained diffusion models. A growing research direction attempts to employ diffusion models to perform downstream vision tasks by exploiting their deep understanding of image semantics. Yet, the majority of these approaches have focused on image-related tasks like semantic segmentation, with less emphasis on video tasks such as VSS. Ideally, diffusion-based image semantic segmentation approaches can be applied to videos in a frame-by-frame manner. However, we find their performance on videos to be subpar due to the absence of any modeling of temporal information inherent in the video data. To this end, we tackle this problem and introduce a framework tailored for VSS based on pre-trained image and video diffusion models. We propose building a scene context model based on the diffusion features, where the model is autoregressively updated to adapt to scene changes. This context model predicts per-frame coarse segmentation maps that are temporally consistent. To refine these maps further, we propose a correspondence-based refinement strategy that aggregates predictions temporally, resulting in more confident predictions. Finally, we introduce a masked modulation approach to upsample the coarse maps to a high-quality full resolution. Experiments show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing training-free image semantic segmentation approaches on various VSS benchmarks without any training or fine-tuning. Moreover, it rivals supervised VSS approaches on the VSPW dataset despite not being explicitly trained for VSS.