SED: A Simple Encoder-Decoder for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Bin Xie, Jiale Cao, Jin Xie, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Yanwei Pang

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation strives to distinguish pixels into different semantic groups from an open set of categories. Most existing methods explore utilizing pre-trained vision-language models in which the key is to adopt the image-level model for pixel-level segmentation task. In this paper we propose a simple encoder-decoder named SED for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation which comprises a hierarchical encoder-based cost map generation and a gradual fusion decoder with category early rejection. The hierarchical encoder-based cost map generation employs hierarchical backbone instead of plain transformer to predict pixel-level image-text cost map. Compared to plain transformer hierarchical backbone better captures local spatial information and has linear computational complexity with respect to input size. Our gradual fusion decoder employs a top-down structure to combine cost map and the feature maps of different backbone levels for segmentation. To accelerate inference speed we introduce a category early rejection scheme in the decoder that rejects many no-existing categories at the early layer of decoder resulting in at most 4.7 times acceleration without accuracy degradation. Experiments are performed on multiple open-vocabulary semantic segmentation datasets which demonstrates the efficacy of our SED method. When using ConvNeXt-B our SED method achieves mIoU score of 31.6% on ADE20K with 150 categories at 82 millisecond (ms) per image on a single A6000. Our source code is available at https://github.com/xb534/SED.