Superpixel segmentation with deep learning has been proposed in recent years and is widely employed to reduce the input image primitives for subsequent computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a Triple Multi-Scale Attention based Network (TMANet) for superpixel segmentation. First, aiming to extract more detailed context information, we design a Triple Multi-Scale Attention (TMA) to adapt the varying object scale and reduce inevitable redundant information in the encoder. Moreover, we observe that the dark parts with low probability in the association map generated by the TMANet are closer to the superpixel boundary. Therefore, we devise Boundary Association (BA) loss based on the association map to obtain fine boundaries and contours. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that TMANet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods to a certain extent. The application in saliency object detection of remote sensing also demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method.

With the breakthrough of large models, Segment Anything Model (SAM) and its extensions have been attempted to apply in diverse tasks of computer vision. Underwater salient instance segmentation is a foundational and vital step for various underwater vision tasks, which often suffer from low segmentation accuracy due to the complex underwater circumstances and the adaptive ability of models. Moreover, the lack of large-scale datasets with pixel-level salient instance annotations has impeded the development of machine learning techniques in this field. To address these issues, we construct the first large-scale underwater salient instance segmentation dataset (USIS10K), which contains 10,632 underwater images with pixel-level annotations in 7 categories from various underwater scenes. Then, we propose an Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation architecture based on Segment Anything Model (USIS-SAM) specifically for the underwater domain. We devise an Underwater Adaptive Visual Transformer (UA-ViT) encoder to incorporate underwater domain visual prompts into the segmentation network. We further design an out-of-the-box underwater Salient Feature Prompter Generator (SFPG) to automatically generate salient prompters instead of explicitly providing foreground points or boxes as prompts in SAM. Comprehensive experimental results show that our USIS-SAM method can achieve superior performance on USIS10K datasets compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Datasets and codes are released on https://github.com/LiamLian0727/USIS10K.

Underwater image instance segmentation is a fundamental and critical step in underwater image analysis and understanding. However, the paucity of general multiclass instance segmentation datasets has impeded the development of instance segmentation studies for underwater images. In this paper, we propose the first underwater image instance segmentation dataset (UIIS), which provides 4628 images for 7 categories with pixel-level annotations. Meanwhile, we also design WaterMask for underwater image instance segmentation for the first time. In Water-Mask, we first devise Difference Similarity Graph Attention Module (DSGAT) to recover lost detailed information due to image quality degradation and downsampling to help the network prediction. Then, we propose Multi-level Feature Refinement Module (MFRM) to predict foreground masks and boundary masks separately by features at different scales, and guide the network through Boundary Mask Strategy (BMS) with boundary learning loss to provide finer prediction results. Extensive experimental results demonstrates that WaterMask can achieve significant gains of 2.9, 3.8 mAP over Mask R-CNN when using ResNet-50 and ResNet-101. Code and Dataset are available at https://github.com/LiamLian0727/WaterMask.