Superpixel Anything: A general object-based framework for accurate yet regular superpixel segmentation
This addresses the trade-off between accuracy and regularity in superpixel segmentation for computer vision applications, offering a robust tool, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing deep learning and segmentation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating superpixels that are both accurate and regular, introducing SPAM, a framework that leverages pretrained models for semantic-agnostic segmentation to align superpixels with object masks, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in experiments.
Superpixels are widely used in computer vision to simplify image representation and reduce computational complexity. While traditional methods rely on low-level features, deep learning-based approaches leverage high-level features but also tend to sacrifice regularity of superpixels to capture complex objects, leading to accurate but less interpretable segmentations. In this work, we introduce SPAM (SuperPixel Anything Model), a versatile framework for segmenting images into accurate yet regular superpixels. We train a model to extract image features for superpixel generation, and at inference, we leverage a large-scale pretrained model for semantic-agnostic segmentation to ensure that superpixels align with object masks. SPAM can handle any prior high-level segmentation, resolving uncertainty regions, and is able to interactively focus on specific objects. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SPAM qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms state-of-the-art methods on segmentation tasks, making it a valuable and robust tool for various applications. Code and pre-trained models are available here: https://github.com/waldo-j/spam.