Coarse Mask Guided Interactive Object Segmentation

Interactive object segmentation aims to produce object masks with user interactions, such as clicks, bounding boxes, and scribbles. Click point is the most popular interactive cue for its efficiency, and related deep learning methods have attracted lots of interest in recent years. Most works encode click points as gaussian maps and concatenate them with images as the model’s input. However, the spatial and semantic information of gaussian maps would be noised through multiple convolution layers and won’t be fully exploited by top layers for mask prediction. To pass click information to top layers exactly and efficiently, we propose a coarse mask guided model (CMG) which predicts coarse masks with a coarse module to guide the object mask prediction. Specifically, the coarse module encodes user clicks as query features and enriches their semantic information with backbone features through transformer layers, coarse masks are generated based on the enriched query feature and fed into CMG’s decoder. Benefiting from the efficiency of transformer, CMG’s coarse module and decoder module are lightweight and computationally efficient, making the interaction process more smooth. Experiments on several segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and we get new state-of-the-art results compared with previous works.