Self-Supervised Image Segmentation using Meta-Learning and Multi-Backbone Feature Fusion

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to reduce the need for manual annotation, which is both expensive and time-consuming. While FSS enhances model generalization to new concepts with only limited test samples, it still relies on a substantial amount of labeled training data for base classes. To address these issues, we propose a multi-backbone few shot segmentation (MBFSS) method. This self-supervised FSS technique utilizes unsupervised saliency for pseudo-labeling, allowing the model to be trained on unlabeled data. In addition, it integrates features from multiple backbones (ResNet, ResNeXt, and PVT v2) to generate a richer feature representation than a single backbone. Through extensive experimentation on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i, our method achieves 54.3% and 25.1% on one-shot segmentation, exceeding the baseline methods by 13.5% and 4%, respectively. These improvements significantly enhance the model’s performance in real-world applications with negligible labeling effort.