PhraseClick: Toward Achieving Flexible Interactive Segmentation by Phrase and Click

Henghui Ding, Scott Cohen, Brian Price, Xudong Jiang ;

Existing interactive object segmentation methods mainly take spatial interactions such as bounding boxes or clicks as input. However, these interactions do not contain information about explicit attributes of the target-of-interest and thus cannot quickly specify what the selected object exactly is, especially when there are diverse scales of candidate objects or the target-of-interest contains multiple objects. Therefore, excessive user interactions are often required to reach desirable results. On the other hand, in existing approaches attribute information of objects is often not well utilized in interactive segmentation. We propose to employ phrase expressions as another interaction input to infer the attributes of target object. In this way, we can 1) leverage spatial clicks to locate the target object and 2) utilize semantic phrases to qualify the attributes of the target object. Specifically, the phrase expressions focus on ``what"" the target object is and the spatial clicks are in charge of ``where"" the target object is, which together help to accurately segment the target-of-interest with smaller number of interactions. Moreover, the proposed approach is flexible in terms of interaction modes and can efficiently handle complex scenarios by leveraging the strengths of each type of input. Our multi-modal phrase+click approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance on interactive segmentation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage both clicks and phrases for interactive segmentation."