# Boundary-by-Mask: Few-Shot Instance Segmentation with Mask-Conditioned Boundary Learning for Texture-Poor Industrial Parts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21594/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [PANet: Few-Shot Image Semantic Segmentation with Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06391/) (2019)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [Detect What You Can: Detecting and Representing Objects using Holistic Models and Body Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2031/) (2014)
- [Boundary loss for highly unbalanced segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07032/) (2018)
- [PACO: Parts and Attributes of Common Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01795/) (2023)
- [Matcher: Segment Anything with One Shot Using All-Purpose Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13310/) (2023)
- [Deep Watershed Transform for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08303/) (2016)
- [Incremental Few-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05312/) (2021)
- [FGN: Fully Guided Network for Few-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13954/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11507/) (2018)
- [Spider: A Unified Framework for Context-dependent Concept Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01002/) (2024)
- [Symmetry Aware Evaluation of 3D Object Detection and Pose Estimation in Scenes of Many Parts in Bulk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08129/) (2018)
- [No time to train! Training-Free Reference-Based Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02798/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust Part-aware Instance Segmentation for Industrial Bin Picking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02767/) (2022)
- [SAM-IF: Leveraging SAM for Incremental Few-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11034/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in large pre-trained models have led to remarkable progress in instance segmentation on general images. However, industrial scenarios remain challenging. Instance definitions are often application-specific and inconsistent, and the domain gap from general imagery is substantial due to weak textures and limited contextual cues. Consequently, a direct application of existing models is unreliable. We propose Boundary-by-Mask, a few-shot instance segmentation framework that supervises boundaries instead of interior appearance. Given a few RGB images and corresponding instance masks, the method extracts rich visual features using a foundation-model encoder and trains a lightweight Signed Distance Function (SDF) head to predict boundary-aware distance maps. Segmentation masks are obtained through an SDF-to-mask reconstruction process. By explicitly estimating contours, the framework achieves reliable instance separation even on low-texture and color-uniform surfaces. The instance definition is conditioned by the instance mask. Replacing the mask specifies the segmentation target, such as the whole object or a sub-part. A pixel-wise shallow MLP head enables rapid training. Experiments on industrial parts and food items with ambiguous boundaries show strong few-shot generalization, robustness in feature-poor conditions, and precise control over mask-level targets.