Interactive Object Segmentation With Inside-Outside Guidance

This article explores how to harvest precise object segmentation masks while minimizing the human interaction cost. To achieve this, we propose a simple yet effective interaction scheme, named Inside-Outside Guidance (IOG). Concretely, we leverage an inside point that is clicked near the object center and two outside points at the symmetrical corner locations (top-left and bottom-right or top-right and bottom-left) of an almost-tight bounding box that encloses the target object. The interaction results in a total of one foreground click and four background clicks for segmentation. The advantages of our IOG are four-fold: 1) the two outside points can help remove distractions from other objects or background; 2) the inside point can help eliminate the unrelated regions inside the bounding box; 3) the inside and outside points are easily identified, reducing the confusion raised by the state-of-the-art DEXTR Maninis et al. 2018, in labeling some extreme samples; 4) it naturally supports additional click annotations for further correction. Despite its simplicity, our IOG not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on several popular benchmarks such as GrabCut Rother et al. 2004, PASCAL Everingham et al. 2010 and MS COCO Russakovsky et al. 2015, but also demonstrates strong generalization capability across different domains such as street scenes (Cityscapes Cordts et al. 2016), aerial imagery (Rooftop Sun et al. 2014 and Agriculture-Vision Chiu et al. 2020) and medical images (ssTEM Gerhard et al. 2013). Code is available at https://github.com/shiyinzhang/Inside-Outside-Guidancehttps://github.com/shiyinzhang/Inside-Outside-Guidance.