Image Segmentation

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13 papers in the last four weeks, up 44% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 302

Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

GFR-SAM: Training-Free Referring Camouflaged Object Segmentation via Cross-Image Prompting

Referring Camouflaged Object Detection (Ref-COD) requires segmenting hidden targets guided by reference cues. While supervised methods are annotation-heavy and training-free approaches via sparse point-prompting are sensitive to localization errors, we propose GFR-SAM, a robust three-stage training-free framework. GFR-SAM shifts the paradigm from fragile point-matching to a "Generate-Filter-Refine" pipeline. First, we introduce In-Context Exemplar-guided Segmentation, empowering SAM3 with cross-image inference to generate candidate masks via holistic visual exemplars, bypassing its native intra-image constraints. Second, a Region-Global Contrastive Filtering module ranks candidates through DINOv3-based prototypical alignment, effectively suppressing background distractors. Finally, a Geometric-Semantic Refinement module synergizes bounding box and text prompts to recover fine-grained boundaries and enhance instance recall. Evaluated on the R2C7K benchmark, GFR-SAM outperforms existing training-free methods by 8.7% in weighted F-measure (

F_β^w

) and competes with supervised state-of-the-art counterparts. Ultimately, this work underscores the potential of unlocking SAM3's latent capability for cross-image In-Context prompting, establishing a robust, training-free paradigm that effectively bridges the gap between general-purpose foundation models and specialized, label-intensive perception tasks without the need for task-specific fine-tuning.

Yilong Yang, Jianxin Tian, Shengchuan Zhang +1

Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University

Image Segmentation Promptable Image Segmentation Referring Image Segmentation Camouflaged Object Detection

Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

Parallax Portrait Matting

Image matting is highly ill-posed, especially when both the foreground and background are richly textured. While single-image matting methods learn strong priors from data, they often struggle on these challenging cases. Existing approaches improve results by requiring additional signals such as green screens, polarized lighting, or clean background images, but these typically rely on specialized capture setups. We present Parallax Portrait Matting, a practical two-frame matting method that uses a second image captured with slight viewpoint change. Such a setting arises naturally in burst photography, where small camera motion induces foreground-background parallax and provides complementary observations for matting. Our pipeline estimates trimaps and foreground/background motion, then constructs aligned views for prediction. To handle imperfect motion estimation, the network uses the background-aligned pair for direct fusion and the foreground-aligned cue through cross-attention for error compensation. Experiments show that our method recovers finer details and more accurate foreground colors than strong single-image matting baselines on challenging portrait cases.

Xin Cai, Jiawen Chen, Lars Jebe +2

Multimedia Laboratory, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Shanghai AI Laboratory, Shanghai, China · Adobe NextCam, San Jose, CA, USA +1

Image Segmentation Image Editing

Jul 12, 2026cs.CV

HyperBank: A Differentiable Bank of Classical Priors for Few-Shot Spheroid Microscopy Segmentation

Few-shot spheroid segmentation must adapt to new cell lines, microscopes, and illumination conditions from only a small set of annotated images. While foundation few-shot segmenters can be accurate, their large opaque backbones make it difficult to understand which visual cues drive success or failure. We study this question with HyperBank, a differentiable bank of classical image-processing operators combining Frangi vesselness, a Sauvola threshold pyramid, structure-tensor responses, gradient magnitude, and Laplacian-of-Gaussian filters. HyperBank is fitted on the annotated support images and evaluated on disjoint held-out images across three independently acquired spheroid datasets. We treat it not as a general replacement for foundation models, but as a compact, interpretable few-shot microscopy pipeline and an analytic-prior probe of which classical cues carry the few-shot signal. The results show that, adapted on the same few annotated support images, a compact bank of analytic priors is competitive with, and on small-cluster, contrast-driven data can outperform, much larger foundation models, while those models remain stronger on externally sourced, texture-dominated spheroids. Leave-one-family-out ablations indicate that the useful few-shot signal is distributed across operator families and strengthened by support-set-tuned morphology.

M. Průšek, A. Novozámský, F. Šroubek +3

The Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Information Theory and Automation, Prague, Czechia

Image Segmentation Microscopy Image Analysis

Jul 11, 2026cs.CV

Self-supervised Automatic Matting

High-quality alpha mattes are notoriously expensive to annotate, creating a fundamental data bottleneck for deep image matting. While prior work attempts to reduce annotation cost using coarser labels like trimaps or masks, they remain reliant on costly per-pixel supervision, limiting scalability and generalization. In this work, we push the boundary further and ask: can we train an automatic matting model using only RGB images, with no manual annotation at all? We answer this by presenting SSMatte, a self-supervised framework that for the first time achieves performance on par with fully-supervised automatic matting. Our key insight is to decompose the problem into semantic anchoring and detail matting. SSMatte first generates a semantic matting prompt from frozen self-supervised ViT features by propagating class-token seeds via a novel, training-efficient semantic anchoring loss based on a generalized Rayleigh quotient. This prompt then anchors a detail matting network, which is optimized via a fixed-point-based loss that enforces alpha-RGB consistency. Extensive experiments show SSMatte outperforms prior weakly-supervised methods, matches the performance of fully-supervised models on portrait benchmarks, and demonstrates favorable scaling and generalization behaviors with additional data. Our work pushes automatic matting to an fresh, fully annotation-free paradigm. Code will be available.

Xiaonan Hu, Zhiyuan Lu, Jingdong Zhao +1

Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China · Beijing Normal University, China · Waseda University, Japan

Image Segmentation

Jul 11, 2026cs.CV

ScratNet: A Swin-Based Multi-Scale Dilated Network with Precision Refinement for Semiconductor Scratch Segmentation

Surface scratch defects in semiconductor manufacturing pose significant challenges due to their irregular shapes, low contrast, and varying scales. Traditional inspection methods often struggle to detect such defects reliably, especially in complex imaging scenarios. While deep learning approaches based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have improved accuracy, they often fail to capture fine-grained edge details. To address these limitations, we propose ScratNet, a novel end-to-end scratch segmentation framework that integrates a modified Swin Transformer backbone with a tailored decoder. The decoder incorporates a Multi-Scale Dilated Aggregation (MDA) module to capture both local and global context, a Stem Integration Module (SIM) to restore spatial detail, and a Precision Refinement (PR) branch that enhances boundary sharpness using anisotropic convolutions. Through this stage-adaptive feature aggregation and boundary-aware refinement, ScratNet achieves superior accuracy on thin and irregular defects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ScratNet consistently outperforms existing methods, providing a scalable and robust solution for automated scratch inspection in high-precision manufacturing.

Sachin Ranjan, Hoon Kim

Machine Intelligence and Data Science (MINDS) Lab and the M.S. Program in Electronics Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, South Korea · Machine Intelligence and Data Science (MINDS) Lab and the Department of Electronics Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, South Korea

Image Segmentation Vision Transformer Semiconductor Manufacturing Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Boundary-Aware Segmentation

Jul 10, 2026cs.CV

REBASE: Reference-Background Subspace Elimination for Training-Free In-Context Segmentation

Training-free in-context segmentation enables new object categories to be introduced at inference time from a single annotated reference image, eliminating the retraining and memory overhead of class-incremental learning. Recent approaches achieve this by combining vision foundation models for semantic correspondence with promptable segmentation networks like SAM. However, their performance is fundamentally limited by the quality of the cross-image similarity map; shared contextual backgrounds between the reference and query systematically elevate similarity in non-target regions, degrading prompt localization. We present REBASE, a training-free framework that explicitly suppresses these spurious contextual correspondences. Our method identifies the low-rank background feature subspace from the reference image and project the reference and query features onto its orthogonal complement in closed form, yielding cleaner semantic matching. We then generate positive point prompts using similarity-weighted farthest-point sampling, paired with a refined dense similarity prior. Without any training or parameter updates, our approach establishes a new state of the art among training-free methods on PACO-Part, FSS-1000, and cross-domain datasets such as ISIC2018, demonstrating that explicit background subspace removal is a highly effective principle for one-shot localization.

Mantha Sai Gopal, Jaison Saji Chacko, Harsh Nandwana +3

CamCom Technologies Private Limited*

Image Segmentation Promptable Image Segmentation Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation Semantic Segmentation

Jul 9, 2026cs.CV

Attention-Based Segmentation of WMHs and Differentiation of Vascular vs. Demyelinating Lesions

White Matter Hyperintensities (WMHs) are commonly observed in brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans. They are associated with various neurological conditions, including vascular and inflammatory demyelinating diseases. Despite differing in etiology, WMHs from these conditions often appear similar on Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) images. This similarity makes differential diagnosis challenging. In this work, we highlight the potential of combining attention-based segmentation with feature-driven classification. This approach supports more accurate and efficient classification between vascular and demyelinating white matter pathologies. For segmentation, we evaluate the effectiveness of attention mechanisms, specifically the Bottleneck Attention Module (BAM) and the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM). We also test different architectures, particularly Attention U-Net. In addition, we explore advanced training strategies, such as patch-based learning and a 2.5D approach, to enhance lesion detection. After segmentation, we extract morphological features from the lesion masks. We then use them to classify WMHs based on their underlying cause. Our experiments utilize five publicly available datasets with diverse imaging protocols to promote model generalizability, despite limited sample sizes. The results suggest that attention-based segmentation and feature-driven classification offer a promising direction for discriminating vascular and demyelinating white matter lesions. Further validation in larger clinical cohorts is still needed.

Aina Tur-Serrano, Gabriel Moyà-Alcover, Francisco J. Perales López

UGiVIA Research Group, Dpt. of Mathematics and Computer Science, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca, 07122, Spain

Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation Neuroimaging

Jul 8, 2026cs.CV

Widest-Path Reachability Fields for Connectivity-Preserving Slender Structure Segmentation

Segmenting slender curvilinear structures such as retinal vessels, cracks, and roads demands topological correctness, as even a single-pixel discontinuity can fragment a continuous network and invalidate downstream analysis. Under standard binary-mask supervision, models optimized for pixel-level overlap frequently produce topologically broken predictions. We trace this to a fundamental mismatch: pixel-wise losses distribute gradients uniformly, yet connectivity hinges on a sparse set of bottleneck pixels. These pixels are vastly outnumbered by thick structures and background, rendering their aggregate gradient contribution negligible. We term this phenomenon topological gradient starvation (TGS). To address it, we propose Widest-Path Reachability Fields (WPRF), a differentiable Max-Min reachability objective that redirects gradient flow to connectivity bottlenecks. The module is plug-and-play, backbone-agnostic, and incurs no inference overhead. WPRF implements a differentiable Max-Min objective via dynamic programming on a domain-restricted graph, coupled with a bottleneck-aware observation term that balances gradient contributions across varying structures. Compared to prior topology-aware losses that rely on post-hoc skeletonization or homology computation, WPRF directly optimizes end-to-end reachability via differentiable Max-Min algebra, enabling gradient flow to concentrate on connectivity bottlenecks without auxiliary structures. We introduce OMVIS, a new oral microvessel segmentation dataset. Experiments across nine architectures and six datasets validate the bottleneck-focused gradient routing mechanism. WPRF improves 87% of experiments with fixed hyperparameters and achieves clDice gains of 7.2 percentage points on structurally fragile datasets.

Youcheng Zong, Runda Jia, Minxuan Hu +2

College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110004, China · Changsha Stomatological Hospital, Changsha 410005, China

Image Segmentation Topology-Preserving Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation Differentiable Optimization

Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

Enhanced Seam Segmentation for Automated Welding Robot in Construction Through Transfer Learning: Addressing Limitations of Bilateral Segmentation Network

Reliable seam segmentation is essential for autonomous robotic welding in construction, where harsh illumination, specular reflections, and thin weld geometries often degrade segmentation performance. This study proposes a reflection-robust seam segmentation framework that enhances a BiSeNetV2 backbone through transfer learning and a hybrid Cross-Entropy--Lovász loss. Rather than increasing architectural complexity, the proposed framework improves reflection robustness through learning-stability-oriented optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 81.76% Joint IoU and 90.73% mIoU, improving Joint IoU by +22.36 percentage points over the OHEM-based baseline while maintaining identical FLOPs, parameter count, and inference speed. The proposed approach also recovers 96.33% of severe zero-IoU failure cases under reflective conditions. Comparative experiments across BiSeNetV2, DeepLabV3+, UNet, and SegFormer further demonstrate that the proposed optimization strategy is particularly effective for lightweight real-time segmentation architectures. Qualitative analyses additionally show improved seam continuity and reflection robustness in challenging welding environments. These findings suggest that the proposed framework provides a practical and lightweight perception solution for robotic welding applications involving reflective metallic surfaces.

Keonvin Park, Yong Ann Voeurn, Hyeokjun Kweon +1

Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, Republic of Korea · Department of Civil Engineering and Construction, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA 30460, USA · The Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science, Multimedia & Film, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, 06974, Republic of Korea

Image Segmentation Robotics Semantic Segmentation

Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

Probe-EM: Targeted Neuron Tracing via Training-Free Semantic Verification

Establishing large-scale, high-resolution neural connectivity maps is fundamental to elucidating the structural basis of brain function. However, when processing terabyte- or petabyte-scale electron microscopy data, over-segmentation inherent in automated reconstruction algorithms remains a critical bottleneck, requiring extensive manual proofreading spanning person-years. To alleviate the heavy reliance on annotated data and the limited flexibility of conventional tracing methods, we propose a training-free, targeted neuron tracing framework. Specifically, we introduce a skeleton-guided Heuristic Spatial Search paradigm that leverages geometric priors to iteratively reconstruct neuronal morphologies through a probing-verification cycle. To achieve robust zero-shot semantic verification, we further develop a Dimension-Aware Semantic Verification strategy built upon the foundation model NeuroSAM 2. This strategy resolves intra-slice splits via Planar Ensemble Consensus and inter-slice splits via Axial Spatio-Temporal Propagation. Notably, we integrate the proposed workflow into the Neuroglancer visualization platform, enabling an interactive human-in-the-loop proofreading system. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms supervised baselines and reduces manual proofreading time by 33.4%. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/HeadLiuYun/Probe-EM.

Liuyun Jiang, Yanchao Zhang, Jinyue Guo +5

State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +1

Image Segmentation Microscopy Image Analysis

Jul 5, 2026cs.CV

Road-Aware Anomaly Segmentation with Query-Guided Polygons and CLIP in Autonomous Driving

Traditional semantic segmentation models operate under a closed-set assumption and struggle to recognize unknown or unexpected objects-an essential capability for autonomous driving. As a result, such models often misclassify or overlook out-of-distribution (OOD) road anomalies, posing safety risks in open-world environments. We present a lightweight, postprocessing, road-aware anomaly segmentation framework that requires no retraining, no OOD data, and no auxiliary supervision. Our approach builds on a mask transformer-based segmentation network by exploiting query-level mask confidence and deriving a polygonal road prior to detect gap regions that may correspond to anomalies. To further suppress false positives, we introduce a CLIP-based zero-shot semantic filtering module using in-distribution prompts, with optional generalized OOD prompts. By jointly leveraging spatial priors and semantic verification, our framework produces robust and interpretable anomaly predictions. Evaluation on three public benchmarks-Fishyscapes, SMIYC, and RoadAnomaly-shows consistently strong performance. In particular, our method outperforms the training-free baseline Maskomaly on most metrics and achieves the highest AP on Fishyscapes LostAndFound. These results demonstrate the practicality and deployability of our approach for real-world autonomous driving systems.

Zhiran Yan, Gordon Elger

Institute of Innovative Mobility (IIMo), Technical University Ingolstadt of Applied Sciences, Ingolstadt, 85049, Germany. · Fraunhofer Institute for Transportation and Infrastructure Systems IVI, Ingolstadt, 85051, Germany.

Image Segmentation Autonomous Driving Perception OOD Detection Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Jul 5, 2026cs.CV

Pixel-Precise Explainable Stress Indexing: A Semantic Segmentation Framework for Disease Severity Quantification in Field Crops

Plant diseases, resulting from both biotic and abiotic stresses, cause an estimated 20-40% loss in global agricultural yield annually, resulting in economic damages exceeding USD 220 billion. Accurate and scalable stress quantification is essential for precision agriculture, yet traditional manual assessments are labour-intensive and subjective. This paper proposes a unified deep learning pipeline integrating semantic segmentation, regression-based severity estimation, and disease classification. Stress severity is categorised into four levels (Low to Very High) based on the proportion of infected leaf area. Experiments on the Apple Tree Leaf Disease Segmentation dataset (1,641 samples, six classes) evaluate four models: U-Net (MobileNetV2), SegFormer, FCN, and PSPNet. U-Net with MobileNetV2 achieves the best performance with 98.20% pixel accuracy, 0.70 mIoU, and 99.41% detection accuracy at 14.7 ms per image, making it suitable for real-time use. SegFormer performs competitively (mIoU 0.66), while FCN and PSPNet show lower spatial accuracy (approximately 0.49 mIoU). The computed severity index strongly correlates with expert annotations (r = 0.968, R^2 = 0.937), demonstrating the system's reliability for automated crop monitoring and decision support.

Raunak Kumar, Soumyashree Kar

Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Agricultural Image Analysis Image Segmentation Plant Disease Classification Semantic Segmentation

Jul 4, 2026cs.CV

Exploring SAM Supervision for Fine-Grained UAV Target Segmentation under Data Scarcity

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target segmentation remains challenging due to the small size of objects, appearance variations, cluttered backgrounds, and the scarcity of densely annotated data. These factors hinder the performance and practical deployment of lightweight segmentation models in real-world UAV applications. To address this problem, this paper investigates the use of SAM3 (Segment Anything Model 3) as a pseudo-label generator for training compact segmentation networks. Specifically, two supervision paradigms are explored: (i) direct pseudo-supervision using unaltered SAM3-generated masks, and (ii) a refinement strategy that re-applies SAM3 to localized image patches for improved mask quality. Based on these paradigms, a two-stage SAM3-guided pseudo-label generation framework is proposed. In the first stage, SAM3 generates coarse masks for initial object localization. The localized regions are subsequently cropped into patches and processed by SAM3 again to generate fine masks with accurate object boundaries and discard false positives. The resulting coarse and fine masks are then used as pseudo-labels to optimize a lightweight network, termed IPS-Seg, which consists of three components: an IdentityFormer backbone for feature extraction, an Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling module for multi-scale context aggregation, and a PixelShuffle-based decoder for spatial resolution recovery. Extensive experiments under multiple supervision settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The results show that IPS-Seg achieves a favorable trade-off between segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency while benefiting consistently from the proposed pseudo-label generation strategy. These findings highlight the potential of large-scale foundation models as annotation sources for training compact task-specific segmentation networks in low-label vision domains.

Le-Anh Tran

Image Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Pseudo-Labeling Semantic Segmentation

Jul 2, 2026cs.CV

When Does Resolution Help a Frozen Backbone? Global Attention at Resolution Predicts Scalable Adaptation for Camouflaged and Marine Animal Segmentation

Adapting frozen vision foundation models to fine-grained segmentation now largely depends on backbone selection. Whether the backbone applies global attention to a high-resolution token set predicts whether a low-rank adapter turns resolution into accuracy. Isotropic ViTs attend globally over the full grid and keep improving with resolution; hierarchical backbones confine early attention to local windows and pool the grid before their global stages, plateauing at lower resolutions. A controlled six-backbone study establishes the pattern, and editing the backbone points to the cause: pooling keeps the benefit, removing global attention does not. The effect is specific to low-rank adaptation. Under one fixed pipeline, SALT (Side-stem, Attention-gated U-Net, Low-rank Tuning), one RGB-only pass on a strong isotropic backbone wins the best S-measure on the four data-matched camouflaged sets, and leads every marine and salient set. It reaches a new state of the art on both marine-animal benchmarks (MAS3K mIoU 0.878).

Tyler Rust, Chandra Kambhamettu

University of Delaware · University of South Florida

Image Segmentation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Low-Rank Adaptation Fine-Grained Visual Perception

Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

Beyond Pixel Overlap: A Framework for Decomposing Segmentation Evaluation Metrics

Evaluation metrics are central to binary target segmentation because they determine how progress is measured, compared, and interpreted. In this paper, target denotes the task-defined positive region to be segmented rather than a generic foreground object. It may be salient, camouflaged, transparent, glass-like, mirror-like, shadow-like, lesion-like, or defined by other application-specific semantics. We treat existing metrics as compositions of modular design choices rather than isolated formulas. The proposed framework decomposes each metric into five stages covering prediction representation, target extraction, target matching, score computation, and metric reporting. We use this framework to analyze representative metrics and show how newer metrics address specific limits in earlier protocols. The stage choices keep each metric's assumptions visible. We then discuss the design space opened by the framework and its implications for task-aware evaluation protocols. Reference code is available at https://github.com/lartpang/PySODMetrics.

Youwei Pang, Xiaoqi Zhao

Nanyang Technological University

Image Segmentation

Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

PGE-SAM: Prompt-Guided Feature Enhancement for Interactive Segmentation under Degradation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized promptable image segmentation with strong zero-shot generalization. However, its performance degrades substantially under real-world imaging artifacts such as noise, blur, and compression. Existing methods restore features globally without focusing on segmentation-relevant regions and neglect SAM's iterative refinement mechanism, leading to suboptimal performance in interactive settings. We propose Prompt-Guided Feature Enhancement SAM (PGE-SAM), a framework that explicitly leverages user prompts and prior mask predictions to spatially guide the feature restoration process toward regions of interest through a Prompt Guidance Generator. To recover fine-grained details lost under degradation, we introduce Multi-Scale Features Interaction to incorporate low-level encoder features, along with a Foreground Reconstruction Loss that restricts feature-level supervision to the segmentation target. Furthermore, we present DM-Seg, a benchmark for interactive segmentation on degraded medical images, spanning multiple imaging modalities with both general and modality-specific degradations at varying severity levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PGE-SAM achieves SOTA robustness on both medical and natural image domains across multiple degradation levels, while maintaining generalization to clean images and adding less than one-fifth of the parameters of prior methods.

Tuan-Duc Nguyen, Anh-Tuan Mai, Duc-Trong Le

FPT Software AI Center · VNU University of Engineering and Technology

Interactive Medical Image Segmentation Image Segmentation Promptable Image Segmentation Segment Anything Models Medical Image Benchmarks

Jun 27, 2026cs.CV

CCRC: A Change-Aware Captioning and Reasoning Chain for Image Change Captioning and Segmentation

Understanding and localizing subtle changes between paired images is critical for tasks such as surveillance and image editing. However, traditional Image Change Captioning (ICC) methods lack spatial grounding, limiting their precision. We introduce Image Change Captioning and Segmentation (ICCS), a new multimodal task that jointly requires structured change description and pixel-level localization. To address ICCS, we propose the Change-aware Captioning and Reasoning Chain (CCRC), a dual-chain framework that decouples semantic reasoning from spatial segmentation. The first chain, Chain-of-Change-Captioning (CCC), enhances fine-grained change perception via a visual fusion module based on Multi-Head Change-aware Attention inserted between the visual and language components of a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). CCC also determines whether a change is segmentable. If not, it alone generates the caption. Otherwise, the second chain, Chain-of-Change-Segmenting (CCS), is activated, leveraging spatial priors from CCC and refining masks with a Change-aware Token Refiner for accurate boundary localization. We evaluate CCRC on both synthetic and real-world change detection benchmarks with pixel-level supervision. Experiments show CCRC achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Jinhong Hu, Xiaoping Wang, Shuyin Huang +3

College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, China · Guangxi Minzu University, China · National University of Defense Technology, China

Image Captioning Image Segmentation

Jun 26, 2026cs.CV

Temporal-Emerged Prompting for Segment Anything in Multiframe Infrared Small Target Detection

Accurately localizing and segmenting small targets in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) infrared sequences remains a challenging task. Since targets are often indistinguishable from the background in individual frames, existing methods, even when equipped with advanced foundation model and powerful inter-frame association mechanisms, still fail to detect them. Motivated by the observation that targets tend to emerge gradually from the background over time and become distinguishable, we propose Temporal-Emerged Prompting for Segment Anything Model (TEP-SAM), a principled framework designed to explicitly exploit such temporal-emerged cues to modulate and prompt SAM. TEP-SAM operates by jointly modeling global motion patterns and local motion deviations to locate potential targets. It further enhances target region features by leveraging motion discrepancy, thereby generating temporal-emerged cues for SAM and enabling non-interactive segmentation. By bridging large-scale semantic pretraining with task-specific temporal modeling, TEP-SAM effectively adapts SAM to the challenging multiframe infrared small target detection task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, particularly under severely low-SNR conditions and in complex dynamic background.

Yinghui Xing, Donghao Chu, Shizhou Zhang +1

Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Image Segmentation Promptable Image Segmentation Infrared Small Target Detection

Jun 24, 2026cs.CV

Beyond Aesthetics: Quantifying Information Loss in Turbid Scenes

Visibility in underwater environments degrades rapidly under turbid conditions, yet the effects on computer-vision models remain unclear. This issue is compounded by reliance on synthetic turbidity datasets, which may misrepresent real-world information loss. To address this gap, we introduce the Turbid Underwater Baseline (TUB) dataset, comprising 1,320 images captured under extreme turbidity and over 16,000 high-confidence ground-truth segmentation masks. We additionally propose PCD, a metric derived from phase congruency maps that is invariant to contrast and aims to capture the loss of structural information in real turbidity. We show that PCD correlates strongly with the performance of instance segmentation models on both real and synthetic turbid images, whereas common metrics in the field show weak to no correlation at all. The dataset and relevant code can be found on the project page: https://vap.aau.dk/pcd

Vasiliki Ismiroglou, Stefan H. Bengtson, Tasos Benos +2

Visual Analysis and Perception Laboratory, Aalborg University, Denmark · Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Denmark

Image Segmentation Underwater Imaging Image Quality Assessment

Jun 24, 2026cs.CV

DCSNet: Multiscale Feature Aggregation for Small Medical Object Segmentation with Detection-guided Hierarchical Cropping

Small object segmentation in medical imaging is primarily hindered by class imbalance and inherent boundary complexity. Consequently, conventional global networks frequently fail to detect sparse targets or suffer from severe edge degradation. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Detection-guided Cropping Segmentation Network (DCSNet), an end-to-end framework that transforms global dense prediction into a localized refinement process. This framework integrates two core components, namely Detection-guided Hierarchical Cropping (DGHC) and Multiscale Feature Aggregation (MSFA). The DGHC module leverages region proposals to dynamically extract object-centric features, effdataectively filtering out massive background interference to mitigate class imbalance. Subsequently, the MSFA module operates strictly within these purified regions, synergizing a Transformer encoder with a pixel-adaptive fusion strategy. This mechanism dynamically aggregates multiscale features to capture both semantic context and fine-grained details for sharp boundary delineation. Extensive experiments across three diverse medical datasets demonstrate that DCSNet significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, yielding substantial improvements in boundary precision and offering a highly robust solution for clinical micro-lesion segmentation.

Shanfeng Zhang, Bo Gou, Yue Cao +3

College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, 610065, Chengdu, China · The First Affiliated Hospital of Chengdu Medical College, School of Clinical Medicine, Chengdu Medical College, 610065, Chengdu, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Sichuan University, 610065, Chengdu, China

Image Segmentation Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Medical Image Segmentation

Jun 23, 2026cs.CV

Ingredient-Level Food Image Segmentation for Nutrition Awareness

Food images often contain several visible ingredients, so assigning one dish label to an entire image hides important visual structure. This work studies ingredient-level semantic segmentation on FoodSeg103, where the model predicts an ingredient class for each pixel. Two SegFormer variants were fine-tuned and evaluated under a controlled setup: SegFormer-B0 as the smaller baseline model and SegFormer-B1 as the larger final model. Both models use ImageNet-pretrained MiT backbones with newly initialized 104-class output layers. On the held-out FoodSeg103 test split of 2,135 images, B0 achieved 0.7709 pixel accuracy and 0.2521 mean IoU, while B1 achieved 0.7929 pixel accuracy and 0.3204 mean IoU. B1 improved every saved test metric, including a +0.0683 absolute gain in mean IoU. The system also converts predicted masks into visible ingredient-area percentages, giving a simple visual composition summary of the predicted meal. This summary can serve as a first-pass nutrition-awareness cue by providing a visual alternative to detailed food tracking similar to plate-based meal guidance, but it is not a direct estimate of calories, macronutrients, food mass, volume, density, or true portion size.

Jonesh Shrestha

Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media DePaul University Chicago Illinois United States

Image Segmentation Semantic Segmentation

Jun 22, 2026cs.CV

From Reconstruction to Decision: A Post-Encoder Plug-in Adapter for Curvilinear Segmentation

Curvilinear object segmentation, including vessels and cracks, is challenging due to extreme spatial sparsity and topological fragility, where small local errors can cause severe structural disconnections. Meanwhile, modern segmentation pipelines increasingly rely on strong but hard-to-modify foundation encoders whose heavy downsampling limits fine structural recovery. Motivated by this, we focus on the post-encoder stage and study two recurring and actionable failure modes: a reconstruction bottleneck in high-resolution feature restoration and a decision bottleneck in binarization. We present PEPA, a lightweight Post-Encoder Plug-in Adapter for 2D curvilinear segmentation pipelines with accessible decoder/head features and target, query, or class descriptors. PEPA couples (i) Target-Conditioned Snake Upsampling (TCSU), which uses target-conditioned continuous snake-like sampling to better recover thin and tortuous structures during upsampling, and (ii) Target-Adaptive Differentiable Thresholding (TADT), which predicts target-specific thresholds and optimizes a soft-threshold surrogate with explicit safeguards against trivial bias shifting. Under this post-encoder interface, PEPA can be attached to both prompt-based decoders and conventional dense predictors. Experiments on five medical and industrial benchmarks show that adding PEPA to frozen-encoder baselines yields consistent improvements, with gains in topological connectivity (clDice) typically exceeding those in region overlap (IoU), indicating improved structural continuity. With only

\sim

0.26M additional parameters, PEPA offers a practical post-encoder enhancement for structure-centric segmentation.

Qin Lei, Jiang Zhong, Xin Xiao +2

Center for Big Data and Intelligent Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China · College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China · Key Laboratory of Digital Health and Intelligent Medicine, Chongqing Municipal Health Commission, Chongqing, China +1

Image Segmentation Topology-Preserving Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation

Jun 22, 2026cs.CV

SEMIR: Topology-Preserving Graph Minors for Thin-Structure Segmentation

Thin-structure segmentation--power lines, cracks, lane markings at 1-3 pixel width--requires preserving connectivity that standard representations preclude: patching severs continuous structures and conventional superpixels merge thin targets into background before classification. Topology-aware losses penalize connectivity breaks at the objective level but cannot recover what the representation has already destroyed. We propose SEMIR, a framework that replaces the pixel lattice with a parameterized graph minor whose contraction map preserves thin-structure connectivity under the contraction criterion. The minor collapses millions of pixels into tens or hundreds of boundary-aligned supernodes, enabling full-resolution inference without patching at scales demonstrated up to 21 MP in this paper; a lightweight GNN classifies the reduced graph and an exact map lifts predictions to pixel resolution. One pipeline--identical architecture, features, loss, and GNN hyperparameters across all dataset--matches or exceeds domain-specific baselines on TTPLA (power lines), CrackSeg9k (pavement cracks), and SkyScapes Lane (aerial markings) on Dice, IoU, and Boundary F1 while reducing mask fragmentation by at least 4.6x relative to SLIC at matched inference.

Luke James Miller, Yugyung Lee

University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City MO 64110, USA

Image Segmentation Graph Coarsening Topology-Preserving Image Segmentation

Jun 22, 2026cs.CV

Polynomial Dice Loss for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a fundamental task for medical image processing and computer-assisted intervention, yet data imbalance and small lesion detection pose significant challenges. Dice Loss, which measures the overlap between predicted and ground truth regions, is widely used to mitigate these issues. To further emphasize its properties, we propose Polynomial Dice Loss, a polynomial extension of Dice Loss. Specifically, by leveraging the geometric characteristics of Dice Loss and formulating the loss function as a polynomial representation via Taylor expansion, we enable the adjustment of the contribution of higher-order components to the loss function. In our experiments, we evaluate the proposed method against loss functions derived from conventional Dice and Tversky coefficients. Experimental results and further analysis show that the polynomial formulation provides a simple way to control the loss shape and achieves competitive performance across multiple segmentation settings.

Hiroaki Aizawa

Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering Hiroshima University Higashi-Hiroshima, Japan

Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation

Jun 20, 2026cs.CV

Accurate identification and measurement of the precipitate area by two-stage deep neural networks in novel chromium-based alloys

The performance of advanced materials for extreme environments is underpinned by their microstructure, including the size and distribution of reinforcing phases. Chromium-based superalloys are a recently proposed alternative to conventional face-centred-cubic superalloys for high-temperature applications, such as Concentrated Solar Power, and their development requires efficient measurement of precipitate volume fraction and size distribution from electron microscopy images. Traditional fixed-threshold image processing is sensitive to background noise, generalises poorly across materials, and requires substantial manual measurement effort. To address these bottlenecks, this study proposes DT-SegNet, an end-to-end two-stage deep learning scheme based on YOLOv5 and SegFormer for object detection and segmentation in electron microscopy images. The approach combines the training efficiency of convolutional neural networks at the detection stage with the segmentation accuracy of a Vision Transformer. Numerical experiments show that DT-SegNet substantially outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation tools offered by Weka and ilastik across metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The model provides a useful tool for alloy-development microstructure examinations and helps address the large datasets associated with high-throughput alloy development.

Zeyu Xia, Kan Ma, Sibo Cheng +7

Queensland University of Technology, Queensland 4000, Australia · School of Metallurgy and Materials, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2SQ, United Kingdom. · Data Science Institute, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom. +4

Image Segmentation Materials Science Semantic Segmentation Microscopy Image Analysis

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

CurvSegFlow: Time-Conditioned Flow Matching for Robust Segmentation of Curvilinear Structures in Noisy Biomedical Images

Accurate segmentation of curvilinear structures remains challenging in biomedical imaging due to their thin geometry, complex topology, and sensitivity to noise. This is particularly critical for microscopy images of cytoskeletal network, where low signal-to-noise ratios and dense filament crossings often lead to fragmented or inaccurate segmentation. In this work, we propose CurvSegFlow, a segmentation framework based on time-conditioned flow matching. Instead of predicting a segmentation mask in a single pass, the method models segmentation as a dynamic process that progressively refines a noisy initialization into the target structure through a learned velocity field. The proposed model combines a U-Net backbone with triple-term loss function and temporal embeddings to guide the refinement process across reconstruction stages. This formulation enables gradual error correction and improves the continuity of thin structures. CurvSegFlow is evaluated on multiple synthetic and real microtubule datasets, as well as on public benchmarks of retinal vessels, corneal nerves and coronary arteries. Across datasets, the method achieves competitive or superior performance compared to established segmentation models, with consistent improvements in precision and structural continuity, particularly under low signal-to-noise conditions. These results show that flow-based iterative refinement provides a robust and general framework for curvilinear structure segmentation. Overall, the proposed approach improves segmentation quality in challenging imaging conditions and generalizes effectively across modalities without architectural changes.

Sidi Mohamed Sid'El Moctar, Achraf Ait Laydi, Alexandre Beber +4

CNRS, Univ. Rennes, Institute of Genetics and Development of Rennes (IGDR), Rennes, France · TIAD Laboratory, Sciences and Technology Faculty, Sultan Moulay Slimane Univ, Beni Mellal, Morocco · Institute of Biotechnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Vestec, Czech Republic

Flow Matching Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation Microscopy Image Analysis

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

Technical Report for ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Exploring Query-Based Segmentation and Increased Spatial Context for Outdoor Scene Understanding

In this report, we present our submission to the GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge, organized as part of the Workshop on Field Robotics at ICRA 2026. The challenge combines data from the GOOSE and GOOSE-Ex datasets, which comprise more than 13k images captured from 4 distinct camera setups, annotated using a hierarchical taxonomy of 56 fine-grained classes and 11 broader categories. Starting from SegFormer as a baseline, we progressively improve segmentation performance through increased training crop sizes, a transition to the query-based Mask2Former architecture, and test-time augmentation. Our experiments show that query-based segmentation significantly outperforms the baseline model. Furthermore, increasing the crop size used during training yields substantial gains, highlighting the relevance of preserving scene context for fine-grained semantic disambiguation. Our final submission, using test-time augmentation, achieves an mIoU of 69.6% on the challenge test set, providing a strong baseline for fine-grained semantic segmentation in outdoor environments. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, code and weights will be made publicly available at https://github.com/RoboticsLabURJC/outdoor-fine-grained-segmentation .

David Pascual-Hernández, Roberto Calvo-Palomino, Inmaculada Mora-Jiménez +1

1Authors are with Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Telematics and Computing Systems, Rey Juan Carlos University, Fuenlabrada, 28943, Spain.

Image Segmentation Semantic Segmentation

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

Neural Architecture Distributions: A New Paradigm for Stochastic Segmentation

Stochastic segmentation seeks to represent multiple plausible masks for a single image, which is essential in safety- and quality-critical applications such as medical imaging or building defect inspection. Most existing methods introduce stochasticity by injecting continuous latent variables or by iterative denoising trajectories, whose stochastic sources are difficult to search or audit directly. We propose architecture distributions as a new stochastic source for segmentation: instead of sampling a latent variable or noise, we sample a discrete architecture from a learned distribution over operator choices at multiple searchable positions in a segmentation backbone. Each sampled architecture yields one mask through the selected active path, so inference depends on the executed subnet rather than the complete candidate bank. This approach also supports architectural provenance, since each output corresponds to a specific architecture configuration. To reduce collapse toward averaged masks, we train with set-level supervision by matching a set of architecture-sampled predictions to the annotation set using an IoU-based energy-distance surrogate. We further construct the candidate bank with evolutionary search, making the support of the stochastic source optimizable before distribution learning. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art distribution matching and hypothesis coverage on LIDC-IDRI, and remains effective on two extension tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to formulate stochastic segmentation as learning an architecture distribution and realizing output diversity through architecture sampling.

Conghui Li, Junhao Huang, Chern Hong Lim +2

School of Information Technology, Monash University Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia · Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation Segmentation Uncertainty Estimation

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

Sparse Point-Guided Fusion of Supervised and Self-Supervised Learning Model for Seaweed Segmentation

The ocean plays a critical role in sustainable development, particularly in climate change mitigation. Among marine ecosystems, blue carbon ecosystems are recognized as important natural carbon sinks. In this context, this paper addresses precise seaweed classification for blue carbon quantification in Ocean Digital Twin initiatives. Conventional methods, including supervised learning (limited by data scarcity and domain gaps) and self-supervised learning (unable to assign class labels), struggle with underwater complexities and diverse seaweed species. To overcome this, we propose a novel two-stage seaweed segmentation technique. This technique first utilizes Supervised and Self-supervised Learning Model Propagation (SSL.Prop.), which leverages supervised learning for initial class information and approximate locations, guiding self-supervised learning for detailed, accurate segmentation. Subsequently, MaskFusion (MF) refines these results by merging instance-level masks for highly accurate segmentation. This integrated approach allows automatic class label assignment and mitigates domain gap effects. Specifically, instance segmentation estimates sparse point locations which then guide self-supervised learning for detailed region segmentation. Evaluated with underwater images from Yamaguchi Prefecture, our full proposed method (SSL.Prop.+MF) achieved a 0.082 mIoU improvement over USIS-SAM, demonstrating significant accuracy gains, particularly for small seaweed. This approach demonstrates strong potential for improving blue carbon quantification and marine ecosystem monitoring.

Tatsuya Suzuki, Kazuya Ijuin, Hideki Tomimori +2

Fujitsu Limited Kawasaki, Japan

Image Segmentation Instance Segmentation

Jun 17, 2026cs.CV

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.

Jonas Naumann, Jonas P. Appels, Julius Biermann +3

Image Segmentation Instance Segmentation Materials Science Microscopy Image Analysis