Unsupervised image segmentation aims at grouping different semantic patterns in an image without the use of human annotation. Similarly, image clustering searches for groupings of images based on their semantic content without supervision. Classically, both problems have captivated researchers as they drew from sound mathematical concepts to produce concrete applications. With the emergence of deep learning, the scientific community turned its attention to complex neural network-based solvers that achieved impressive results in those domains but rarely leveraged the advances made by classical methods. In this work, we propose a patch-based unsupervised image segmentation strategy that bridges advances in unsupervised feature extraction from deep clustering methods with the algorithmic help of classical graph-based methods. We show that a simple convolutional neural network, trained to classify image patches and iteratively regularized using graph cuts, naturally leads to a state-of-the-art fully-convolutional unsupervised pixel-level segmenter. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this is the ideal setting for leveraging the patch-level pairwise features generated by vision transformer models. Our results on real image data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology.

本研究提出了一种基于图像块的无监督图像分割策略，将深度聚类方法中无监督特征提取的进展与经典基于图形的方法的算法帮助相结合。我们展示了一个简单的卷积神经网络，通过使用图割来迭代地正则化图像块的分类，从而自然地实现了最先进的全卷积无监督像素级分割器。此外，我们证明了这是利用由视觉变换器模型生成的图像块级别对偶特征的理想场景。我们在真实图像数据上的结果证明了我们提出方法的有效性。

基于补丁的深度无监督图像分割使用图割