Category-Aware Siamese Learning Network for Few-Shot Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation (FS) which aims to segment unseen query image based on a few annotated support samples is an active problem in computer vision and multimedia field. It is known that the core issue of FS is how to leverage the annotated information from the support images to guide query image segmentation. Existing methods mainly adopt Siamese Convolutional Neural Network (SCNN) which first encodes both support and query images and then utilizes the masked Global Average Pooling (GAP) to facilitate query image pixel-level representation and segmentation. However, this pipeline generally fails to fully exploit the category/class coherent information between support and query images. For FS task, one can observe that both support and query images share the same category information. This inherent property provides an important cue for FS task. However, previous methods generally fail to fully exploit it for FS task. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel Category-aware Siamese Learning Network (CaSLNet) to encode both support and query images. The proposed CaSLNet conducts Category Consistent Learning (CCL) for both support images and query images and thus can achieve the information communication between support and query images more sufficiently. Comprehensive experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate the advantage of our proposed CaSLNet. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HuiSun123/CaSLN.