# Segmentation from Natural Language Expressions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06180/

## Key facts

- Cited by 257 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 257)

- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10092/) (2018)
- [Generalized Decoding for Pixel, Image, and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11270/) (2022)
- [GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00968/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05565/) (2021)
- [MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08544/) (2023)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16372/) (2021)
- [GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10103/) (2023)
- [PolyFormer: Referring Image Segmentation as Sequential Polygon Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07387/) (2023)
- [Referring Transformer: A One-step Approach to Multi-task Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03089/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Referring Video Object Segmentation with Multimodal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14821/) (2021)
- [ReSTR: Convolution-free Referring Image Segmentation Using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16768/) (2022)
- [Encoder Fusion Network with Co-Attention Embedding for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01839/) (2021)
- [VLT: Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15871/) (2022)
- [Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13721/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07175/) (2021)
- [Locate then Segment: A Strong Pipeline for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16284/) (2021)
- [Your Large Vision-Language Model Only Needs A Few Attention Heads For Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06287/) (2025)
- [Rotated Multi-Scale Interaction Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12470/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Applications of Transformers for Deep Learning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07303/) (2023)
- [General Object Foundation Model for Images and Videos at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09158/) (2023)
- [Beyond One-to-One: Rethinking the Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13853/) (2023)
- [EVF-SAM: Early Vision-Language Fusion for Text-Prompted Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20076/) (2024)
- [OnlineRefer: A Simple Online Baseline for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09356/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper we approach the novel problem of segmenting an image based on a natural language expression. This is different from traditional semantic segmentation over a predefined set of semantic classes, as e.g., the phrase "two men sitting on the right bench" requires segmenting only the two people on the right bench and no one standing or sitting on another bench. Previous approaches suitable for this task were limited to a fixed set of categories and/or rectangular regions. To produce pixelwise segmentation for the language expression, we propose an end-to-end trainable recurrent and convolutional network model that jointly learns to process visual and linguistic information. In our model, a recurrent LSTM network is used to encode the referential expression into a vector representation, and a fully convolutional network is used to a extract a spatial feature map from the image and output a spatial response map for the target object. We demonstrate on a benchmark dataset that our model can produce quality segmentation output from the natural language expression, and outperforms baseline methods by a large margin.