# Masked Cross-image Encoding for Few-shot Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11201/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [PANet: Few-Shot Image Semantic Segmentation with Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06391/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Few-Shot Image Classification: a Good Embedding Is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11539/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03410/) (2017)
- [Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01449/) (2020)
- [CANet: Class-Agnostic Segmentation Networks with Iterative Refinement and Attentive Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02351/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01893/) (2021)
- [Hypercorrelation Squeeze for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01538/) (2021)
- [Prototype Mixture Models for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03898/) (2020)
- [Feature Weighting and Boosting for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13140/) (2019)
- [SG-One: Similarity Guidance Network for One-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09091/) (2018)
- [Part-aware Prototype Network for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06309/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Segmentation Without Meta-Learning: A Good Transductive Inference Is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06166/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Segmentation via Cycle-Consistent Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02320/) (2021)
- [Learning What Not to Segment: A New Perspective on Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07615/) (2022)
- [Simpler is Better: Few-shot Semantic Segmentation with Classifier Weight Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03032/) (2021)
- [CRNet: Cross-Reference Networks for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10658/) (2020)
- [Mining Latent Classes for Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15402/) (2021)
- [Learning Cross-Image Object Semantic Relation in Transformer for Few-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00784/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Spatial Structure Constraints for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11122/) (2024)
- [Group-On: Boosting One-Shot Segmentation with Supportive Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11871/) (2024)
- [Task Consistent Prototype Learning for Incremental Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13094/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) is a dense prediction task that aims to infer the pixel-wise labels of unseen classes using only a limited number of annotated images. The key challenge in FSS is to classify the labels of query pixels using class prototypes learned from the few labeled support exemplars. Prior approaches to FSS have typically focused on learning class-wise descriptors independently from support images, thereby ignoring the rich contextual information and mutual dependencies among support-query features. To address this limitation, we propose a joint learning method termed Masked Cross-Image Encoding (MCE), which is designed to capture common visual properties that describe object details and to learn bidirectional inter-image dependencies that enhance feature interaction. MCE is more than a visual representation enrichment module; it also considers cross-image mutual dependencies and implicit guidance. Experiments on FSS benchmarks PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i demonstrate the advanced meta-learning ability of the proposed method.