Power of Boundary and Reflection: Semantic Transparent Object Segmentation using Pyramid Vision Transformer with Transparent Cues

Tuan-Anh Vu, Hai Nguyen-Truong, Ziqiang Zheng, Binh-Son Hua, Qing Guo, Ivor W. Tsang, Sai-Kit Yeung; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026, pp. 3360-3369

Glass is a prevalent material among solid objects in everyday life, yet segmentation methods struggle to distinguish it from opaque materials due to its transparency and reflection. While it is known that human perception relies on boundary and reflective-object features to distinguish glass objects, the existing literature has not yet sufficiently captured both properties when handling transparent objects. Hence, we propose incorporating both of these powerful visual cues via the Boundary Feature Enhancement and Reflection Feature Enhancement modules in a mutually beneficial way. Our proposed framework, TransCues, is a pyramidal transformer encoder-decoder architecture to segment transparent objects. We empirically show that these two modules can be used together effectively, improving overall performance across various benchmark datasets, including glass object semantic segmentation, mirror object semantic segmentation, and generic segmentation datasets. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin, achieving +4.2% mIoU on Trans10K-v2, +5.6% mIoU on MSD, +10.1% mIoU on RGBD-Mirror, +13.1% mIoU on TROSD, and +8.3% mIoU on Stanford2D3D, showing the effectiveness of our method against glass objects.