# Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03041 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03041/

## Key facts

- Cited by 110 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 118 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Res2Net: A New Multi-scale Backbone Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01169/) (2019)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Deeply-Supervised Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5185/) (2014)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 110)

- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Segment Anything in High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01567/) (2023)
- [Tracking Anything with Decoupled Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03903/) (2023)
- [NeRDi: Single-View NeRF Synthesis with Language-Guided Diffusion as General Image Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03267/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything Is Not Always Perfect: An Investigation of SAM on Different Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05750/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Orthogonal Finetuning via Butterfly Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06243/) (2023)
- [Bilateral Reference for High-Resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03407/) (2024)
- [High-Quality Entity Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05776/) (2022)
- [IM-3D: Iterative Multiview Diffusion and Reconstruction for High-Quality 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08682/) (2024)
- [What Matters When Repurposing Diffusion Models for General Dense Perception Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06090/) (2024)
- [Gen3DSR: Generalizable 3D Scene Reconstruction via Divide and Conquer from a Single View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03421/) (2024)
- [VFusion3D: Learning Scalable 3D Generative Models from Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12034/) (2024)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)
- [DiffusionAD: Norm-guided One-step Denoising Diffusion for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08730/) (2023)
- [Seg-R1: Segmentation Can Be Surprisingly Simple with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22624/) (2025)
- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14660/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Image Pyramid Structure for High Resolution Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09475/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Layout Transformer for Content-Aware Layout Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13602/) (2023)
- [SegAgent: Exploring Pixel Understanding Capabilities in MLLMs by Imitating Human Annotator Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08625/) (2025)
- [SegRefiner: Towards Model-Agnostic Segmentation Refinement with Discrete Diffusion Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12425/) (2023)
- [Frequency Decoupling for Motion Magnification via Multi-Level Isomorphic Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07347/) (2024)
- [Multi-view Aggregation Network for Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07445/) (2024)
- [Ghost on the Shell: An Expressive Representation of General 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15168/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Interactive Image Segmentation with Low Latency, High Quality, and Diverse Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00741/) (2024)
- [Let the Chart Spark: Embedding Semantic Context into Chart with Text-to-Image Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14630/) (2023)
- [Alfie: Democratising RGBA Image Generation With No ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14826/) (2024)
- [Mamba or RWKV: Exploring High-Quality and High-Efficiency Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19369/) (2024)
- [Unite-Divide-Unite: Joint Boosting Trunk and Structure for High-accuracy Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14052/) (2023)
- [PA-SAM: Prompt Adapter SAM for High-Quality Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13051/) (2024)
- [ZIM: Zero-Shot Image Matting for Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00626/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a systematic study on a new task called dichotomous image segmentation (DIS) , which aims to segment highly accurate objects from natural images. To this end, we collected the first large-scale DIS dataset, called DIS5K, which contains 5,470 high-resolution (e.g., 2K, 4K or larger) images covering camouflaged, salient, or meticulous objects in various backgrounds. DIS is annotated with extremely fine-grained labels. Besides, we introduce a simple intermediate supervision baseline (IS-Net) using both feature-level and mask-level guidance for DIS model training. IS-Net outperforms various cutting-edge baselines on the proposed DIS5K, making it a general self-learned supervision network that can facilitate future research in DIS. Further, we design a new metric called human correction efforts (HCE) which approximates the number of mouse clicking operations required to correct the false positives and false negatives. HCE is utilized to measure the gap between models and real-world applications and thus can complement existing metrics. Finally, we conduct the largest-scale benchmark, evaluating 16 representative segmentation models, providing a more insightful discussion regarding object complexities, and showing several potential applications (e.g., background removal, art design, 3D reconstruction). Hoping these efforts can open up promising directions for both academic and industries. Project page: https://xuebinqin.github.io/dis/index.html.