Pyramid graph networks with connection attentions for region-based one-shot semantic segmentation

Abstract

One-shot image segmentation aims to undertake the segmentation task of a novel class with only one training image available. The difficulty lies in that image segmentation has structured data representations, which yields a many-to-many message passing problem. Previous methods often simplify it to a one-to-many problem by squeezing support data to a global descriptor. However, a mixed global representation drops the data structure and information of individual elements. In this paper, we propose to model structured segmentation data with graphs and apply attentive graph reasoning to propagate label information from support data to query data. The graph attention mechanism could establish the element-to-element correspondence across structured data by learning attention weights between connected graph nodes. To capture correspondence at different semantic levels, we further propose a pyramid-like structure that models different sizes of image regions as graph nodes and undertakes graph reasoning at different levels. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset demonstrate that our proposed network significantly outperforms the baseline method and leads to new state-of-the-art performance on 1-shot and 5-shot segmentation benchmarks.