NamedMask: Distilling Segmenters from Complementary Foundation Models

Abstract: The goal of this work is to segment and name regions of images without access to pixel-level labels during training. To tackle this task, we construct segmenters by distilling the complementary strengths of two foundation models. The first, CLIP (Radford et al. 2021), exhibits the ability to assign names to image content but lacks an accessible representation of object structure. The second, DINO (Caron et al. 2021), captures the spatial extent of objects but has no knowledge of object names. Our method, termed NamedMask, begins by using CLIP to construct category-specific archives of images. These images are pseudo-labelled with a category-agnostic salient object detector bootstrapped from DINO, then refined by category-specific segmenters using the CLIP archive labels. Thanks to the high quality of the refined masks, we show that a standard segmentation architecture trained on these archives with appropriate data augmentation achieves impressive semantic segmentation abilities for both single-object and multi-object images. As a result, our proposed NamedMask performs favourably against a range of prior work on five benchmarks including the VOC2012, COCO and large-scale ImageNet-S datasets.