Learning to "Segment Anything" in Thermal Infrared Images through Knowledge Distillation with a Large Scale Dataset SATIR

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a promptable segmentation model recently introduced by Meta AI that has demonstrated its prowess across various fields beyond just image segmentation. SAM can accurately segment images across diverse fields, and generating various masks. We discovered that this ability of SAM can be leveraged to pretrain models for specific fields. Accordingly, we have proposed a framework that utilizes SAM to generate pseudo labels for pretraining thermal infrared image segmentation tasks. Our proposed framework can effectively improve the accuracy of segmentation results of specific categories beyond the SOTA ImageNet pretrained model. Our framework presents a novel approach to collaborate with models trained with large data like SAM to address problems in special fields. Also, we generated a large scale thermal infrared segmentation dataset used for pretaining, which contains over 100,000 images with pixel-annotation labels. This approach offers an effective solution for working with large models in special fields where label annotation is challenging. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenjzBUAA/SATIR