Few-shot image semantic segmentation based on meta-learning: A review

Abstract

Deep learning-based image semantic segmentation approaches heavily rely on large-scale training datasets with dense annotations and often suffer from scarce semantic labels for unseen categories. This limitation has spurred a research trend in Few-shot image Semantic Segmentation (FSS), which makes it possible to segment objects of new categories using only a few labeled samples. Although more and more FSS methods are emerging and gradually integrated into practical applications, a deep understanding of its achievements and issues is still missing. In this survey, we focus on the recent developments of FSS, specifically on FSS methods based on meta-learning. According to different network architectures, we summarize the related research into three classes, that are Convolutional Neural Network-based (CNN-based) models, Graph Neural Network-based (GNN-based) models, and Transformer-based models. Then, we explore the specific implementations of these models, including parameter-based methods, metric-based methods, attention-based methods, and optimization-based methods. Furthermore, we illustrate datasets and analyze the experimental results of various kinds of methods. Toward the end of the paper, we discuss the limitations of FSS and present its applications and challenges to provide further research directions.