Object Aware Contrastive Prior for Interactive Image Segmentation

Interactive Image Segmentation is a process of separating a user selected object from the background. This task requires building an effective class-agnostic segmentation model that performs well even on unseen categories. To achieve good accuracy with limited training dataset, it is important that the model has robust prior understanding of features of similar class objects. The model should also have good distinguishing capabilities of foreground objects with the background. In this paper, we propose Object Aware Click Embeddings (OACE) that represents user click aware foreground object features. OACE is obtained based on a prior network trained using the Contrastive Learning paradigm. The single-click object selection accuracy of our base interactive segmentation network is vastly improved with the OACE input. Additionally, we propose a Multi-Stage fusion approach to better utilize user click information. With the proposed method, we outperform existing state-of-the-art approaches by 21% on publicly available test-sets for click-based Interactive Image Segmentation.