Omni-Referring Image Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Omni-Referring Image Segmentation (OmniRIS), a new task that integrates text and visual prompts for highly flexible and generalized image segmentation, supported by a large dataset and a strong baseline model.

Contribution

The paper defines OmniRIS, creates the OmniRef dataset, and proposes OmniSegNet, advancing multi-modal segmentation with omni-prompts and setting new benchmarks.

Findings

OmniSegNet effectively follows omni-modal instructions.

OmniRIS outperforms existing segmentation methods.

The OmniRef dataset enables comprehensive evaluation.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel task termed Omni-Referring Image Segmentation (OmniRIS) towards highly generalized image segmentation. Compared with existing unimodally conditioned segmentation tasks, such as RIS and visual RIS, OmniRIS supports the input of text instructions and reference images with masks, boxes or scribbles as omni-prompts. This property makes it can well exploit the intrinsic merits of both text and visual modalities, i.e., granular attribute referring and uncommon object grounding, respectively. Besides, OmniRIS can also handle various segmentation settings, such as one v.s. many and many v.s. many, further facilitating its practical use. To promote the research of OmniRIS, we also rigorously design and construct a large dataset termed OmniRef, which consists of 186,939 omni-prompts for 30,956 images, and establish a comprehensive evaluation system. Moreover, a strong and general baseline termed OmniSegNet is also proposed to tackle the key challenges of OmniRIS, such as omni-prompt encoding. The extensive experiments not only validate the capability of OmniSegNet in following omni-modal instructions, but also show the superiority of OmniRIS for highly generalized image segmentation.