Slim Scissors: Segmenting Thin Object from Synthetic Background

Abstract

Existing interactive segmentation algorithms typically fail when segmenting objects with elongated thin structures (e.g., bicycle spokes). Though some recent efforts attempt to address this challenge by introducing a new synthetic dataset and a three-stream network design, they suffer two limitations: 1) large performance gap when tested on real image domain; 2) still requiring extensive amounts of user interactions (clicks) if the thin structures are not well segmented. To solve them, we develop Slim Scissors, which enables quick extraction of elongated thin parts by simply brushing some coarse scribbles. Our core idea is to segment thin parts by learning to compare the original image to a synthesized background without thin structures. Our method is model-agnostic and seamlessly applicable to existing state-of-the-art interactive segmentation models. To further reduce the annotation burden, we devise a similarity detection module, which enables the model to automatically synthesize background for other similar thin structures from only one or two scribbles. Extensive experiments on COIFT, HRSOD and ThinObject-5K clearly demonstrate the superiority of Slim Scissors for thin object segmentation: it outperforms TOS-Net by 5.9% IoU$_\textrm{thin}$ and 3.5% $\mathcal {F}$ score on the real dataset HRSOD.

K. Han—Work done during an internship at ByteDance.