Text-Guided Image Segmentation

Overview

Text-guided image segmentation studies how to turn class names, referring expressions, clinical reports, and instructions into precise pixel-level masks. Common approaches align language and visual features with contrastive learning or cross-attention, condition segmentation models such as Segment Anything with text prompts or lightweight adapters, and use generative models or multimodal reasoning to propose and refine masks. These methods support settings from open-vocabulary recognition to medical and remote-sensing segmentation, with training-free, few-shot, and supervised approaches. A central challenge is grounding varied or ambiguous language in accurate boundaries across domains while balancing robustness, reliability, and computational cost.

Latest papers

CardsList

95 papers10 papers in the last four weeks, up 25% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. GarmentSegAgent: Autonomous Garment Segmentation for Web Fashion Images via Textual Self-Refinement

    Oct 27, 2026Jia Chen, Chao Huang, Xinrong Hu +3Text-Guided Image SegmentationSemantic Segmentation

  2. DROA-CLIPSeg: Prompt-Guided Thin Crack Segmentation in Low-Light Conditions

    Oct 24, 2026Vinita Shukla, Partibha Jangra, Vinayak Pathak +2Crack SegmentationImage Segmentation

  3. LLMSeg: Training-Free Text-Prompted Image Segmentation with B-Splines

    Oct 21, 2026Abdullah HamdiImage SegmentationText-Guided Image Segmentation

  4. Reliability-Guided Vision-Language Decoding with Text-Aware Skip Refinement for Medical Image Segmentation

    Oct 20, 2026Sivan Talaei, Fatemeh Daneshfar, Abdulhady Abas Abdullah +1Medical VLMsMedical Image Segmentation

  5. Efficient SAM3 Adaptation for Multi-Class Semantic Segmentation via Dense Competitive Representations

    Oct 20, 2026Wenbin Liao, Hao Zhu, Yike Ma +2Promptable Image SegmentationSemantic Segmentation

  6. Visual Memory and Textual Alignment for Cross-Modal Few-Shot Segmentation

    Oct 19, 2026Tianqi Wei, Zhi Chen, Xin Yu +2Few-Shot Semantic SegmentationText-Guided Image Segmentation

  7. FloodVLM-Pix: Language-Guided Pixel-Level Flood Understanding

    Oct 16, 2026Chengyang Zhang, Zhihao Wang, Zhiyu Long +4Remote Sensing VLMsText-Guided Image Segmentation

  8. Text-Guided Medical Image Segmentation via Residual Aggregation and Dense Alignment Representations

    Oct 10, 2026Jie Gui, Hang Tu, Yunfeng Dou +3Text-Guided Image SegmentationPromptable Image Segmentation

  9. VL-AcneSeg: A Vision-Language Framework for Region-Aware Acne Lesion Segmentation

    Sep 28, 2026Sukju Oh, Soo Ick Cho, Dae Hun Suh +1Text-Guided Image SegmentationMedical VLMs

  10. Multimodal Routing and Region Refinement for Language-Guided Medical Image Segmentation

    Sep 24, 2026Md Maklachur Rahman, Md Hasan Al Banna, Saraf Anjum +2Text-Guided Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

  11. SIRA: Reasoning-Aware Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Query-Anchored Alignment

    Sep 18, 2026Zhibo Zhang, Qijie Wang, Zengqiang YanMedical Image SegmentationReasoning Segmentation

  12. PANORAMA: Panoptic Grounded Captioning via Mask Proposal Selection

    Sep 16, 2026Sara Pieri, Evangelos Kazakos, Shizhe Chen +2Image CaptioningPanoptic Segmentation

  13. ViCo-SAM3: Vision-Conditioned Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation

    Sep 14, 2026Qiangqiang Zhou, Wenjun Tang, Yong Chen +2Text-Guided Image SegmentationOpen-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

  14. InstEditSeg: Instruction-Driven Image Editing for Polyp and Skin Lesion Segmentation

    Sep 2, 2026Ziquan Liu, Zhewei Zhu, Xuyang ShiText-Guided Image SegmentationPolyp Segmentation

  15. Vision-Language-Guided Pseudo-Labels for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation for Waste Sorting

    Sep 1, 2026Udo Schlegel, Shubhangi, Gabriel Dax +3Unsupervised Domain AdaptationText-Guided Image Segmentation

  16. Text-to-seed generation: Training-free open-vocabulary seeded semantic segmentation via re-purposing diffusion as text-guided seed generator

    Aug 27, 2026Kumju Jo, Heesun Jung, Sungyong BaikOpen-Vocabulary Semantic SegmentationSemantic Segmentation

  17. DRAgent: Discriminative Reasoning Agent for Referring Expression Segmentation

    Aug 24, 2026Yujie Qi, Luyan ZhangReferring Expression SegmentationText-Guided Image Segmentation

  18. TEAMS: Text-prompted spatiotEmporal dual-heAd Mamba Snake

    Aug 18, 2026Ruicheng Zhang, Jianhui Lei, Kaiwen Shen +6Medical Image SegmentationText-Guided Image Segmentation

  19. MedPlex: Deep Vision-Language Co-Adaptation for Clinically Grounded Medical Segmentation

    Aug 13, 2026Rafi Ibn Sultan, Hui Zhu, Chengyin Li +1Medical Image SegmentationText-Guided Image Segmentation

  20. Dual-Domain Cross-Modal Decoding for Clinical Text-Guided Medical Image Segmentation

    Aug 11, 2026Md Maklachur Rahman, Tracy HammondText-Guided Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

  21. Bootstrapping Vision-Language Model for Hysteroscopic Surgical Scene Segmentation

    Aug 10, 2026Jun Huang, Meiyi Chen, Zijie Yue +6Text-Guided Image SegmentationMedical VLMs

  22. Toward Mask Annotation-Free Surgical Instrument Segmentation from Endoscopic Images Using Text-Prompted Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3)

    Aug 9, 2026Nakul Poudel, Richard Simon, Cristian A. LinteImage SegmentationText-Guided Image Segmentation

  23. LAD-COD: Language-Aligned Dense Perception for Camouflaged Object Detection

    Aug 8, 2026Shangye Song, Tianzhi Zhu, Syed Ariff Syed Hesham +2Text-Guided Image SegmentationUnsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection

  24. EliSeg: Verified Target Construction for Report-Grounded Abnormality Segmentation

    Aug 7, 2026Chengyi Peng, Haoyu Yang, Meixing Shi +2Text-Guided Image SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

  25. Text-Guided Refinement of Multi-sequence Glioma Subregion Segmentation with a Vision-Language Foundation Model

    Aug 5, 2026Zach Eidex, Yu-nong Lin, Mojtaba Safari +4Interactive Medical Image SegmentationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  26. UniEvo-RS: Omni-Prompt Unified Remote Sensing Segmentation with Representative Exemplar-Driven Prototype Evolution

    Aug 4, 2026Kunquan Zhang, Peilang Li, Xikun Hu +4Remote Sensing Image SegmentationTest-Time Adaptation