Efficient Mask Correction for Click-Based Interactive Image Segmentation

Abstract

The goal of click-based interactive image segmentation is to extract target masks with the input of positive/negative clicks. Every time a new click is placed, existing methods run the whole segmentation network to obtain a corrected mask, which is inefficient since several clicks may be needed to reach satisfactory accuracy. To this end, we propose an efficient method to correct the mask with a lightweight mask correction network. The whole network remains a low computational cost from the second click, even if we have a large backbone. However, a simple correction network with limited capacity is not likely to achieve comparable performance with a classic segmentation network. Thus, we propose a click-guided self-attention module and a click-guided correlation module to effectively exploits the click information to boost performance. First, several templates are selected based on the semantic similarity with click features. Then the self-attention module propagates the template information to other pixels, while the correlation module directly uses the templates to obtain target outlines. With the efficient architecture and two click-guided modules, our method shows preferable performance and efficiency compared to existing methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/feiaxyt/EMC-Click.