Guided Networks for Few-Shot Image Segmentation and Fully Connected CRFs

The goal of the few-shot learning method is to learn quickly from a low-data regime. Structured output tasks like segmentation are challenging for few-shot learning, due to their being high-dimensional and statistically dependent. For this problem, we propose improved guided networks and combine them with a fully connected conditional random field (CRF). The guided network extracts task representations from annotated support images through feature fusion to do fast, accurate inference on new unannotated query images. By bringing together few-shot learning methods and fully connected CRFs, our method can do accurate object segmentation by overcoming poor localization properties of deep convolutional neural networks and can quickly updating tasks, without further optimization, when faced with new data. Our guided network is at the forefront of accuracy for the terms of annotation volume and time.