Open-World Semantic Segmentation Including Class Similarity

Matteo Sodano, Federico Magistri, Lucas Nunes, Jens Behley, Cyrill Stachniss; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 3184-3194

Interpreting camera data is key for autonomously acting systems such as autonomous vehicles. Vision systems that operate in real-world environments must be able to understand their surroundings and need the ability to deal with novel situations. This paper tackles open-world semantic segmentation i.e. the variant of interpreting image data in which objects occur that have not been seen during training. We propose a novel approach that performs accurate closed-world semantic segmentation and at the same time can identify new categories without requiring any additional training data. Our approach additionally provides a similarity measure for every newly discovered class in an image to a known category which can be useful information in downstream tasks such as planning or mapping. Through extensive experiments we show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on classes known from training data as well as for anomaly segmentation and can distinguish between different unknown classes.