Benchmarking Segmentation Models with Mask-Preserved Attribute Editing
Authors: Zijin Yin, Kongming Liang, Bing Li, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Guo

When deploying segmentation models in practice it is critical to evaluate their behaviors in varied and complex scenes. Different from the previous evaluation paradigms only in consideration of global attribute variations (e.g. adverse weather) we investigate both local and global attribute variations for robustness evaluation. To achieve this we construct a mask-preserved attribute editing pipeline to edit visual attributes of real images with precise control of structural information. Therefore the original segmentation labels can be reused for the edited images. Using our pipeline we construct a benchmark covering both object and image attributes (e.g. color material pattern style). We evaluate a broad variety of semantic segmentation models spanning from conventional close-set models to recent open-vocabulary large models on their robustness to different types of variations. We find that both local and global attribute variations affect segmentation performances and the sensitivity of models diverges across different variation types. We argue that local attributes have the same importance as global attributes and should be considered in the robustness evaluation of segmentation models. Code: https://github.com/PRIS-CV/Pascal-EA.