Papers › InfoSeg: Unsupervised Semantic Image Segmentation with Mutual Information Maximization

InfoSeg: Unsupervised Semantic Image Segmentation with Mutual Information Maximization

7 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.03477archive 2025-07-28

Robert Harb, Patrick Knöbelreiter

We propose a novel method for unsupervised semantic image segmentation based on mutual information maximization between local and global high-level image features. The core idea of our work is to leverage recent progress in self-supervised image representation learning. Representation learning methods compute a single high-level feature capturing an entire image. In contrast, we compute multiple high-level features, each capturing image segments of one particular semantic class. To this end, we propose a novel two-step learning procedure comprising a segmentation and a mutual information maximization step. In the first step, we segment images based on local and global features. In the second step, we maximize the mutual information between local features and high-level features of their respective class. For training, we provide solely unlabeled images and start from random network initialization. For quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we use established benchmarks, and COCO-Persons, whereby we introduce the latter in this paper as a challenging novel benchmark. InfoSeg significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art, e.g., we achieve a relative increase of 26% in the Pixel Accuracy metric on the COCO-Stuff dataset.

PaperPDF

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image SegmentationRepresentation LearningSemantic SegmentationUnsupervised Semantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation COCO-Persons InfoSeg Pixel Accuracy 69.6 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation COCO-Stuff-15 InfoSeg Pixel Accuracy 38.8 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation COCO-Stuff-3 InfoSeg Pixel Accuracy 73.8 #3 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Potsdam-3 InfoSeg Pixel Accuracy 71.6 #8 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections