Feature Decoupling-Recycling Network for Fast Interactive Segmentation

Recent interactive segmentation methods iteratively take source image, user guidance and previously predicted mask as the input without considering the invariant nature of the source image. As a result, extracting features from the source image is repeated in each interaction, resulting in substantial computational redundancy. In this work, we propose the Feature Decoupling-Recycling Network (FDRN), which decouples the modeling components based on their intrinsic discrepancies and then recycles components for each user interaction. Thus, the efficiency of the whole interactive process can be significantly improved. To be specific, we apply the Decoupling-Recycling strategy from three perspectives to address three types of discrepancies, respectively. First, our model decouples the learning of source image semantics from the encoding of user guidance to process two types of input domains separately. Second, FDRN decouples high-level and low-level features from stratified semantic representations to enhance feature learning. Third, during the encoding of user guidance, current user guidance is decoupled from historical guidance to highlight the effect of current user guidance. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 datasets from different domains and modalities, which demonstrate the following merits of our model: 1) superior efficiency than other methods, particularly advantageous in challenging scenarios requiring long-term interactions (up to 4.25x faster), while achieving favorable segmentation performance; 2) strong applicability to various methods serving as a universal enhancement technique; 3) well cross-task generalizability, e.g., to medical image segmentation, and robustness against misleading user guidance.