Dichotomous Image Segmentation with Frequency Priors

Abstract

Dichotomous image segmentation (DIS) has a wide range of real-world applications and gained increasing research attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose to tackle DIS with informative frequency priors. Our model, called FP-DIS, stems from the fact that prior knowledge in the frequency domain can provide valuable cues to identify fine-grained object boundaries. Specifically, we propose a frequency prior generator to jointly utilize a fixed filter and learnable filters to extract informative frequency priors. Before embedding the frequency priors into the network, we first harmonize the multi-scale side-out features to reduce their heterogeneity. This is achieved by our feature harmonization module, which is based on a gating mechanism to harmonize the grouped features. Finally, we propose a frequency prior embedding module to embed the frequency priors into multi-scale features through an adaptive modulation strategy. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset, DIS5K, demonstrate that our FP-DIS outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in terms of key evaluation metrics.