TokenCut: Segmenting Objects in Images and Videos with Self-supervised Transformer and Normalized Cut

In this paper, we describe a graph-based algorithm that uses the features obtained by a self-supervised transformer to detect and segment salient objects in images and videos. With this approach, the image patches that compose an image or video are organised into a fully connected graph, in which the edge between each pair of patches is labeled with a similarity score based on the features learned by the transformer. Detection and segmentation of salient objects can then be formulated as a graph-cut problem and solved using the classical Normalized Cut algorithm. Despite the simplicity of this approach, it achieves state-of-the-art results on several common image and video detection and segmentation tasks. For unsupervised object discovery, this approach outperforms the competing approaches by a margin of 6.1%, 5.7%, and 2.6% when tested with the VOC07, VOC12, and COCO20K datasets. For the unsupervised saliency detection task in images, this method improves the score for Intersection over Union (IoU) by 4.4%, 5.6% and 5.2%. When tested with the ECSSD, DUTS, and DUT-OMRON datasets. This method also achieves competitive results for unsupervised video object segmentation tasks with the DAVIS, SegTV2, and FBMS datasets. Our implementation is available at https://www.m-psi.fr/Papers/TokenCut2022/.