Visual segmentation, the task of segmenting an image into semantically meaningful regions, is a cornerstone in machine learning and has widespread applications in industry. Nevertheless, visual segmentation with instruction has been a challenging task for many years. This largely stems from the cross-modal discrepancy between language and image domains, resulting in difficulty in relating the instruction semantics and the pixel-level predictions. In recent years, the remarkable reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have spurred a new wave of research aiming to bridge the disparity between natural language instructions and pixel-level understanding. This survey offers the first comprehensive overview of the rapidly evolving field of LLM-driven visual segmentation. We categorize existing approaches based on their core objectives and methodologies, including reasoning-based segmentation, open-vocabulary segmentation, grounding techniques connecting language to pixels, and extensions to video domains. We review recent seminal works in LLM-based visual segmentation, analyzing their architectural innovations, training strategies, and benchmark performance. Furthermore, we discuss the common datasets, evaluation metrics, and identify key challenges and promising future directions at the intersection of language and visual segmentation. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand the current landscape and future directions of leveraging LLMs for sophisticated visual segmentation tasks and applications. The resource summary is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/Awesome-LLM-Visual-Segmentation.

Object inpainting is a task that involves adding objects to real images and seamlessly compositing them. With the recent commercialization of products like Stable Diffusion and Generative Fill, inserting objects into images by using prompts has achieved impressive visual results. In this paper, we propose a prompt suggestion model to simplify the process of prompt input. When the user provides an image and a mask, our model predicts suitable prompts based on the partial contextual information in the masked image, and the shape and location of the mask. Specifically, we introduce a concept-diffusion in the CLIP space that predicts CLIP-text embeddings from a masked image. These diffused embeddings can be directly injected into open-source in-painting models like Stable Diffusion and its variants. Alternatively, they can be decoded into natural language for use in other publicly available applications such as Generative Fill. Our prompt suggestion model demonstrates a balanced accuracy and diversity, showing its capability to be both contextually aware and creatively adaptive.

Wires and powerlines are common visual distractions that often undermine the aesthetics of photographs. The manual process of precisely segmenting and removing them is extremely tedious and may take up hours, especially on high-resolution photos where wires may span the entire space. In this paper, we present an automatic wire clean-up system that eases the process of wire segmentation and removal/inpainting to within a few seconds. We observe several unique challenges: wires are thin, lengthy, and sparse. These are rare properties of subjects that common segmentation tasks cannot handle, especially in high-resolution images. We thus propose a two-stage method that leverages both global and local contexts to accurately segment wires in high-resolution images efficiently, and a tile-based inpainting strategy to remove the wires given our predicted segmentation masks. We also introduce the first wire segmentation benchmark dataset, WireSegHR. Finally, we demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively that our wire clean-up system enables fully automated wire removal with great generalization to various wire appearances.

The success of deep learning in visual recognition tasks has driven advancements in multiple fields of research. Particularly, increasing attention has been drawn towards its application in agriculture. Nevertheless, while visual pattern recognition on farmlands carries enormous economic values, little progress has been made to merge computer vision and crop sciences due to the lack of suitable agricultural image datasets. Meanwhile, problems in agriculture also pose new challenges in computer vision. For example, semantic segmentation of aerial farmland images requires inference over extremely large-size images with extreme annotation sparsity. These challenges are not present in most of the common object datasets, and we show that they are more challenging than many other aerial image datasets. To encourage research in computer vision for agriculture, we present Agriculture-Vision: a large-scale aerial farmland image dataset for semantic segmentation of agricultural patterns. We collected 94,986 high-quality aerial images from 3,432 farmlands across the US, where each image consists of RGB and Near-infrared (NIR) channels with resolution as high as 10 cm per pixel. We annotate nine types of field anomaly patterns that are most important to farmers. As a pilot study of aerial agricultural semantic segmentation, we perform comprehensive experiments using popular semantic segmentation models; we also propose an effective model designed for aerial agricultural pattern recognition. Our experiments demonstrate several challenges Agriculture-Vision poses to both the computer vision and agriculture communities. Future versions of this dataset will include even more aerial images, anomaly patterns and image channels.

We propose a local adversarial disentangling network (LADN) for facial makeup and de-makeup. Central to our method are multiple and overlapping local adversarial discriminators in a content-style disentangling network for achieving local detail transfer between facial images, with the use of asymmetric loss functions for dramatic makeup styles with high-frequency details. Existing techniques do not demonstrate or fail to transfer high-frequency details in a global adversarial setting, or train a single local discriminator only to ensure image structure consistency and thus work only for relatively simple styles. Unlike others, our proposed local adversarial discriminators can distinguish whether the generated local image details are consistent with the corresponding regions in the given reference image in cross-image style transfer in an unsupervised setting. Incorporating these technical contributions, we achieve not only state-of-the-art results on conventional styles but also novel results involving complex and dramatic styles with high-frequency details covering large areas across multiple facial features. A carefully designed dataset of unpaired before and after makeup images is released at https://georgegu1997.github.io/LADN-project-page.