Multi-Stage Fusion for One-Click Segmentation

Segmenting objects of interest in an image is an essential building block of applications such as photo-editing and image analysis. Under interactive settings, one should achieve good segmentations while minimizing user input. Current deep learning-based interactive segmentation approaches use early fusion and incorporate user cues at the image input layer. Since segmentation CNNs have many layers, early fusion may weaken the influence of user interactions on the final prediction results. As such, we propose a new multi-stage guidance framework for interactive segmentation. By incorporating user cues at different stages of the network, we allow user interactions to impact the final segmentation output in a more direct way. Our proposed framework has a negligible increase in parameter count compared to early-fusion frameworks. We perform extensive experimentation on the standard interactive instance segmentation and one-click segmentation benchmarks and report state-of-the-art performance.