RefCut: Interactive Segmentation with Reference Guidance
It addresses the problem of ambiguous segmentation for users needing efficient annotation of specific targets, representing an incremental improvement with a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles interactive segmentation ambiguity, where user clicks can lead to multiple compliant outcomes, by introducing RefCut, a reference-based framework that reduces user interaction burden and achieves state-of-the-art performance in evaluations.
Interactive segmentation aims to segment the specified target on the image with positive and negative clicks from users. Interactive ambiguity is a crucial issue in this field, which refers to the possibility of multiple compliant outcomes with the same clicks, such as selecting a part of an object versus the entire object, a single object versus a combination of multiple objects, and so on. The existing methods cannot provide intuitive guidance to the model, which leads to unstable output results and makes it difficult to meet the large-scale and efficient annotation requirements for specific targets in some scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce RefCut, a reference-based interactive segmentation framework designed to address part ambiguity and object ambiguity in segmenting specific targets. Users only need to provide a reference image and corresponding reference masks, and the model will be optimized based on them, which greatly reduces the interactive burden on users when annotating a large number of such targets. In addition, to enrich these two kinds of ambiguous data, we propose a new Target Disassembly Dataset which contains two subsets of part disassembly and object disassembly for evaluation. In the combination evaluation of multiple datasets, our RefCut achieved state-of-the-art performance. Extensive experiments and visualized results demonstrate that RefCut advances the field of intuitive and controllable interactive segmentation. Our code will be publicly available and the demo video is in https://www.lin-zheng.com/refcut.