EdgeFlow: Achieving Practical Interactive Segmentation with Edge-Guided Flow

TL;DR

EdgeFlow is a new interactive segmentation architecture that leverages edge-guided flow to achieve high accuracy and speed, outperforming existing methods without needing post-processing or iterative steps.

Contribution

The paper introduces EdgeFlow, a novel architecture that effectively utilizes user clicks and edge information for practical, high-performance interactive segmentation.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks

Operates without post-processing or iterative optimization

Develops an efficient annotation tool for real-world use

Abstract

High-quality training data play a key role in image segmentation tasks. Usually, pixel-level annotations are expensive, laborious and time-consuming for the large volume of training data. To reduce labelling cost and improve segmentation quality, interactive segmentation methods have been proposed, which provide the result with just a few clicks. However, their performance does not meet the requirements of practical segmentation tasks in terms of speed and accuracy. In this work, we propose EdgeFlow, a novel architecture that fully utilizes interactive information of user clicks with edge-guided flow. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without any post-processing or iterative optimization scheme. Comprehensive experiments on benchmarks also demonstrate the superiority of our method. In addition, with the proposed method, we develop an efficient interactive segmentation tool for practical data annotation tasks. The source code and tool is avaliable at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg.