Pay Attention to the Foreground in Object-Centric Learning

The slot attention-based method is widely used in unsupervised object-centric learning, aiming to decompose scenes into interpretable objects and associate them with slots. However, complex backgrounds in the real images can disrupt the model’s focus, leading it to excessively segment background stuff into different regions based on low-level information such as color or texture variations. As a result, the detailed segmentation of foreground objects, which requires shape or geometric information, is often neglected. To address this issue, we introduce a contrastive learning-based indicator designed to differentiate between foreground and background. Integrating this indicator into the existing slot attention-based method enables the model to focus more on segmenting foreground objects while minimizing background distractions. During the testing phase, we utilize a spectral clustering mechanism to refine the results based on the similarity between the slots. Experimental results show that incorporating our method with various state-of-the-art models significantly improves their performance on both simulated data and real-world datasets. Furthermore, multiple sets of ablation experiments confirm the effectiveness of each proposed component. The source code is available at https://github.com/sjyjs09/FG-BG_Indicator.