Papers › Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation

Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation

12 May 2021ICCV 2021 10arXiv:2105.05633archive 2025-07-28

Robin Strudel, Ricardo Garcia, Ivan Laptev, Cordelia Schmid

Image segmentation is often ambiguous at the level of individual image patches and requires contextual information to reach label consensus. In this paper we introduce Segmenter, a transformer model for semantic segmentation. In contrast to convolution-based methods, our approach allows to model global context already at the first layer and throughout the network. We build on the recent Vision Transformer (ViT) and extend it to semantic segmentation. To do so, we rely on the output embeddings corresponding to image patches and obtain class labels from these embeddings with a point-wise linear decoder or a mask transformer decoder. We leverage models pre-trained for image classification and show that we can fine-tune them on moderate sized datasets available for semantic segmentation. The linear decoder allows to obtain excellent results already, but the performance can be further improved by a mask transformer generating class masks. We conduct an extensive ablation study to show the impact of the different parameters, in particular the performance is better for large models and small patch sizes. Segmenter attains excellent results for semantic segmentation. It outperforms the state of the art on both ADE20K and Pascal Context datasets and is competitive on Cityscapes.

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rstrudel/segmenter officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
EricKani/Segmenter-Based-on-OpenMMLab mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
isaaccorley/segmenter-pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
tue-mps/algm-segmenter mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
tue-mps/cts-segmenter mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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MaskTransformer isaaccorley/segmenter-pytorch/segmenter/segmenter.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · aae0d919d8e77e3d · report
Segmenter isaaccorley/segmenter-pytorch/segmenter/segmenter.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 61186cac81f07daa · report
Upsample isaaccorley/segmenter-pytorch/segmenter/segmenter.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 92364877f3ee8bbb · report
accuracy tue-mps/cts-segmenter/segm/metrics.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 2cc3699f9a695af9 · report
policy_gt_gen tue-mps/cts-segmenter/policynet/policynet/data_ade20k.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 59c2c15636de4edc · report
policy_gt_gen tue-mps/cts-segmenter/policynet/policynet/data_cityscapes.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 4b5dbae992d30d9f · report
policy_gt_gen tue-mps/cts-segmenter/policynet/policynet/data_pcontext.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 22ec93cd607fd71b · report

Tasks

DecoderImage ClassificationImage SegmentationSegmentationSemantic SegmentationThermal Image Segmentationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K Seg-L-Mask/16 (MS) Validation mIoU 53.63 #77 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K Seg-B-Mask/16(MS, ViT-B) Validation mIoU 50.0 #121 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K Seg-B/8 (MS, ViT-B) Validation mIoU 49.61 #128 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K val Seg-L-Mask/16 (MS, ViT-L) mIoU 53.63 #38 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K val Seg-B-Mask/16 (MS, ViT-B) mIoU 50.0 #53 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K val Seg-B/8 (MS, ViT-B) Pixel Accuracy 83.37 #56 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K val Seg-B/8 (MS, ViT-B) mIoU 49.61 #56 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation PASCAL Context Seg-L-Mask/16 mIoU 59.0 #16 of 66 Archive leaderboard report
Thermal Image Segmentation RGB-T-Glass-Segmentation Segmenter MAE 0.072 #17 of 22 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.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEConvolutionDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerVision Transformer

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