Fantastic Animals and Where to Find Them: Segment Any Marine Animal with Dual SAM

Pingping Zhang, Tianyu Yan, Yang Liu, Huchuan Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 2578-2587

As an important pillar of underwater intelligence Marine Animal Segmentation (MAS) involves segmenting animals within marine environments. Previous methods don't excel in extracting long-range contextual features and overlook the connectivity between discrete pixels. Recently Segment Anything Model (SAM) offers a universal framework for general segmentation tasks. Unfortunately trained with natural images SAM does not obtain the prior knowledge from marine images. In addition the single-position prompt of SAM is very insufficient for prior guidance. To address these issues we propose a novel feature learning framework named Dual-SAM for high-performance MAS. To this end we first introduce a dual structure with SAM's paradigm to enhance feature learning of marine images. Then we propose a Multi-level Coupled Prompt (MCP) strategy to instruct comprehensive underwater prior information and enhance the multi-level features of SAM's encoder with adapters. Subsequently we design a Dilated Fusion Attention Module (DFAM) to progressively integrate multi-level features from SAM's encoder. Finally instead of directly predicting the masks of marine animals we propose a Criss-Cross Connectivity Prediction (C3P) paradigm to capture the inter-connectivity between discrete pixels. With dual decoders it generates pseudo-labels and achieves mutual supervision for complementary feature representations resulting in considerable improvements over previous techniques. Extensive experiments verify that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances on five widely-used MAS datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Drchip61/Dual SAM.