A Surprisingly Simple Approach to Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

The goal of generalized few-shot semantic segmentation (GFSS) is to recognize novel-class objects through training with a few annotated examples and the base-class model that learned the knowledge about the base classes. Unlike the classic few-shot semantic segmentation, GFSS aims to classify pixels into both base and novel classes, meaning it is a more practical setting. Current GFSS methods rely on several techniques such as using combinations of customized modules, carefully designed loss functions, meta-learning, and transductive learning. However, we found that a simple rule and standard supervised learning substantially improve the GFSS performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for GFSS that does not use the techniques mentioned above. Also, we theoretically show that our method perfectly maintains the segmentation performance of the base-class model over most of the base classes. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. It improved in novel-class segmentation performance in the 1 -shot scenario by 6 . 1% on the PASCAL-5 i dataset, 4 . 7% on the PASCAL-10 i dataset, and 1 . 0% on the COCO-20 i dataset. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/IBM/BCM .