MaskDiffusion: Exploiting Pre-trained Diffusion Models for Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is essential in computer vision for various applications, yet traditional approaches face significant challenges, including the high cost of annotation and extensive training for supervised learning. Additionally, due to the limited predefined categories in supervised learning, models typically struggle with infrequent classes and are unable to predict novel classes. To address these limitations, we propose MaskDiffusion, an innovative approach that leverages pretrained frozen Stable Diffusion to achieve open-vocabulary semantic segmentation without the need for additional training or annotation, leading to improved performance compared to similar methods. We also demonstrate the superior performance of MaskDiffusion in handling open vocabularies, including fine-grained and proper noun-based categories, thus expanding the scope of segmentation applications. Overall, our MaskDiffusion shows significant qualitative and quantitative improvements in contrast to other comparable unsupervised segmentation methods, i.e. on the Potsdam dataset (+10.5 mIoU compared to GEM) and COCO-Stuff (+14.8 mIoU compared to DiffSeg). All code and data will be released at https://github.com/Valkyrja3607/MaskDiffusion.

TAG: Guidance-free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a crucial task in computer vision, where each pixel in an image is classified into a category. However, traditional methods face significant challenges, including the need for pixel-level annotations and extensive training. Furthermore, because supervised learning uses a limited set of predefined categories, models typically struggle with rare classes and cannot recognize new ones. Unsupervised and open-vocabulary segmentation, proposed to tackle these issues, faces challenges, including the inability to assign specific class labels to clusters and the necessity of user-provided text queries for guidance. In this context, we propose a novel approach, TAG which achieves Training, Annotation, and Guidance-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. TAG utilizes pre-trained models such as CLIP and DINO to segment images into meaningful categories without additional training or dense annotations. It retrieves class labels from an external database, providing flexibility to adapt to new scenarios. Our TAG achieves state-of-the-art results on PascalVOC, PascalContext and ADE20K for open-vocabulary segmentation without given class names, i.e. improvement of +15.3 mIoU on PascalVOC. All code and data will be released at https://github.com/Valkyrja3607/TAG.