To bridge the gap between supervised semantic segmentation and real-world applications that acquires one model to recognize arbitrary new concepts, recent zero-shot segmentation attracts a lot of attention by exploring the relationships between unseen and seen object categories, yet requiring large amounts of densely-annotated data with diverse base classes. In this paper, we propose a new open-world semantic segmentation pipeline that makes the first attempt to learn to segment semantic objects of various open-world categories without any efforts on dense annotations, by purely exploiting the image-caption data that naturally exist on the Internet. Our method, Vision-language-driven Semantic Segmentation (ViL-Seg), employs an image and a text encoder to generate visual and text embeddings for the image-caption data, with two core components that endow its segmentation ability: First, the image encoder is jointly trained with a vision-based contrasting and a cross-modal contrasting, which encourage the visual embeddings to preserve both fine-grained semantics and high-level category information that are crucial for the segmentation task. Furthermore, an online clustering head is devised over the image encoder, which allows to dynamically segment the visual embeddings into distinct semantic groups such that they can be classified by comparing with various text embeddings to complete our segmentation pipeline. Experiments show that without using any data with dense annotations, our method can directly segment objects of arbitrary categories, outperforming zero-shot segmentation methods that require data labeling on three benchmark datasets.

本文提出了一种基于图像文本交互的语义分割模型ViL-Seg，通过无需密集标注的方式，利用网络上自然存在的图像和文本数据，学习到能够直接分割任意开放世界类别对象的能力，实验结果在三个基准数据集上优于需要数据标注的零样本分割方法。

通过对比和聚类视觉语言嵌入进行开放世界语义分割