Dual Complementary Prototype Learning for Few-Shot Segmentation

Abstract

Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to transfer knowledge from base classes with sufficient data to represent novel classes with limited few-shot samples. Recent methods follow a metric learning framework with prototypes for foreground representation. However, they still face the challenge of segmentation of novel classes due to inadequate representation of foreground and lack of discriminability between foreground and background. To address this problem, we propose the Dual Complementary prototype Network (DCNet). Firstly, we design a training-free Complementary Prototype Generation (CPG) module to extract comprehensive information from the mask region in the support image. Secondly, we design a Background Guided Learning (BGL) as a complementary branch of the foreground segmentation branch, which enlarges difference between the foreground and its corresponding background so that the representation of novel class in the foreground could be more discriminative. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i demonstrate that our DCNet achieves state-of-the-art results.