# Enhanced Boundary Learning for Glass-like Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15734 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15734/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 69 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08545/) (2017)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) Meets Glass: Mirror and Transparent Objects Cannot Be Easily Detected](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00278/) (2023)
- [Trans4Trans: Efficient Transformer for Transparent Object Segmentation to Help Visually Impaired People Navigate in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03172/) (2021)
- [RUN: Reversible Unfolding Network for Concealed Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18783/) (2025)
- [Glass Segmentation with RGB-Thermal Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05453/) (2022)
- [Trans4Trans: Efficient Transformer for Transparent Object and Semantic Scene Segmentation in Real-World Navigation Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09174/) (2021)
- [SAM-COD: SAM-guided Unified Framework for Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10760/) (2024)
- [RFENet: Towards Reciprocal Feature Evolution for Glass Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06099/) (2023)
- [Spider: A Unified Framework for Context-dependent Concept Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01002/) (2024)
- [Towards Diverse Binary Segmentation via A Simple yet General Gated Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10396/) (2023)
- [MVTrans: Multi-View Perception of Transparent Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11683/) (2023)
- [Delving into Crispness: Guided Label Refinement for Crisp Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15172/) (2023)
- [Reversible Unfolding Network for Concealed Visual Perception with Generative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15027/) (2025)
- [SFNet: Faster and Accurate Semantic Segmentation via Semantic Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04415/) (2022)
- [Progressive Glass Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02280/) (2022)
- [Concealed Object Segmentation with Hierarchical Coherence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11767/) (2024)
- [Inspiring the Next Generation of Segment Anything Models: Comprehensively Evaluate SAM and SAM 2 with Diverse Prompts Towards Context-Dependent Concepts under Different Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01240/) (2024)
- [Structural and Statistical Texture Knowledge Distillation and Learning for Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08043/) (2025)
- [Controllable-LPMoE: Adapting to Challenging Object Segmentation via Dynamic Local Priors from Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21114/) (2025)
- [Polyper: Boundary Sensitive Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08735/) (2023)
- [AlignSAM: Aligning Segment Anything Model to Open Context via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00480/) (2024)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation and Segmentation for Transparent Object with Iterative Semantic and Geometric Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14616/) (2025)
- [Nested Unfolding Network for Real-World Concealed Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18164/) (2025)
- [Transmission-Guided Bayesian Generative Model for Smoke Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00900/) (2023)
- [Internal-External Boundary Attention Fusion for Glass Surface Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00212/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning in Concealed Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10979/) (2025)
- [DifferSeg: Towards Diverse Multimodal Binary Segmentation via Differential Perception and Frequency Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08906/) (2026)
- [Refining Context-Entangled Content Segmentation via Curriculum Selection and Anti-Curriculum Promotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01183/) (2026)
- [BoundarySqueeze: Image Segmentation as Boundary Squeezing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11668/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-Masked Bernoulli Diffusion for Camouflaged Object Detection Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10712/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Glass-like objects such as windows, bottles, and mirrors exist widely in the real world. Sensing these objects has many applications, including robot navigation and grasping. However, this task is very challenging due to the arbitrary scenes behind glass-like objects. This paper aims to solve the glass-like object segmentation problem via enhanced boundary learning. In particular, we first propose a novel refined differential module that outputs finer boundary cues. We then introduce an edge-aware point-based graph convolution network module to model the global shape along the boundary. We use these two modules to design a decoder that generates accurate and clean segmentation results, especially on the object contours. Both modules are lightweight and effective: they can be embedded into various segmentation models. In extensive experiments on three recent glass-like object segmentation datasets, including Trans10k, MSD, and GDD, our approach establishes new state-of-the-art results. We also illustrate the strong generalization properties of our method on three generic segmentation datasets, including Cityscapes, BDD, and COCO Stuff. Code and models is available at urlhttps://github.com/hehao13/EBLNet.