USE: Universal Segment Embeddings for Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation
Authors: Xiaoqi Wang, Wenbin He, Xiwei Xuan, Clint Sebastian, Jorge Piazentin Ono, Xin Li, Sima Behpour, Thang Doan, Liang Gou, Han-Wei Shen, Liu Ren

The open-vocabulary image segmentation task involves partitioning images into semantically meaningful segments and classifying them with flexible text-defined categories. The recent vision-based foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown superior performance in generating class-agnostic image segments. The main challenge in open-vocabulary image segmentation now lies in accurately classifying these segments into text-defined categories. In this paper we introduce the Universal Segment Embedding (USE) framework to address this challenge. This framework is comprised of two key components: 1) a data pipeline designed to efficiently curate a large amount of segment-text pairs at various granularities and 2) a universal segment embedding model that enables precise segment classification into a vast range of text-defined categories. The USE model can not only help open-vocabulary image segmentation but also facilitate other downstream tasks (e.g. querying and ranking). Through comprehensive experimental studies on semantic segmentation and part segmentation benchmarks we demonstrate that the USE framework outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary segmentation methods.