On the Texture Bias for Few-Shot CNN Segmentation

Despite the initial belief that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are driven by shapes to perform visual recognition tasks, recent evidence suggests that texture bias in CNNs provides higher performing and more robust models. This contrasts with the perceptual bias in the human visual cortex, which has a stronger preference towards shape components. Perceptual differences may explain why CNNs achieve human-level performance when large labeled datasets are available, but their performance significantly degrades in low-labeled data scenarios, such as few-shot semantic segmentation. To remove the texture bias in the context of few-shot learning, we propose a novel architecture that integrates a set of difference of Gaussians (DoG) to attenuate high-frequency local components in the feature space. This produces a set of modified feature maps, whose high-frequency components are diminished at different standard deviation values of the Gaussian distribution in the spatial domain. As this results in multiple feature maps for a single image, we employ a bi-directional convolutional long-short-term-memory to efficiently merge the multi scale-space representations. We perform extensive experiments on two well-known few-shot segmentation benchmarks -Pascal i5 and FSS-1000- and demonstrate that our method outperforms significantly state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at: https://github.com/rezazad68/fewshot-segmentation