MSDNet: Multi-Scale Decoder for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation via Transformer-Guided Prototyping

TL;DR

This paper introduces MSDNet, a lightweight multi-scale decoder with transformer-guided prototyping for few-shot semantic segmentation, achieving competitive results by balancing performance and efficiency on standard benchmarks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multi-scale decoder with transformer-guided prototyping that enhances segmentation accuracy while maintaining low computational complexity.

Findings

Achieves competitive results on PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i datasets.

Uses only 1.5 million parameters, demonstrating efficiency.

Balances performance with reduced model complexity.

Abstract

Few-shot Semantic Segmentation addresses the challenge of segmenting objects in query images with only a handful of annotated examples. However, many previous state-of-the-art methods either have to discard intricate local semantic features or suffer from high computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a new Few-shot Semantic Segmentation framework based on the Transformer architecture. Our approach introduces the spatial transformer decoder and the contextual mask generation module to improve the relational understanding between support and query images. Moreover, we introduce a multi scale decoder to refine the segmentation mask by incorporating features from different resolutions in a hierarchical manner. Additionally, our approach integrates global features from intermediate encoder stages to improve contextual understanding, while maintaining a lightweight structure to reduce complexity. This balance between performance and efficiency enables our method to achieve competitive results on benchmark datasets such as PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i in both 1-shot and 5-shot settings. Notably, our model with only 1.5 million parameters demonstrates competitive performance while overcoming limitations of existing methodologies. https://github.com/amirrezafateh/MSDNet