CATrans: Context and Affinity Transformer for Few-Shot Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment novel categories given scarce annotated support images. The crux of FSS is how to aggregate dense correlations between support and query images for query segmentation while being robust to the large variations in appearance and context. To this end, previous Transformer-based methods explore global consensus either on context similarity or affinity map between support-query pairs. In this work, we effectively integrate the context and affinity information via the proposed novel Context and Affinity Transformer (CATrans) in a hierarchical architecture. Specifically, the Relation-guided Context Transformer (RCT) propagates context information from support to query images conditioned on more informative support features. Based on the observation that a huge feature distinction between support and query pairs brings barriers for context knowledge transfer, the Relation-guided Affinity Transformer (RAT) measures attention-aware affinity as auxiliary information for FSS, in which the self-affinity is responsible for more reliable cross-affinity. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.