SegFormer (original) (raw)

Overview

The SegFormer model was proposed in SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers by Enze Xie, Wenhai Wang, Zhiding Yu, Anima Anandkumar, Jose M. Alvarez, Ping Luo. The model consists of a hierarchical Transformer encoder and a lightweight all-MLP decode head to achieve great results on image segmentation benchmarks such as ADE20K and Cityscapes.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

We present SegFormer, a simple, efficient yet powerful semantic segmentation framework which unifies Transformers with lightweight multilayer perception (MLP) decoders. SegFormer has two appealing features: 1) SegFormer comprises a novel hierarchically structured Transformer encoder which outputs multiscale features. It does not need positional encoding, thereby avoiding the interpolation of positional codes which leads to decreased performance when the testing resolution differs from training. 2) SegFormer avoids complex decoders. The proposed MLP decoder aggregates information from different layers, and thus combining both local attention and global attention to render powerful representations. We show that this simple and lightweight design is the key to efficient segmentation on Transformers. We scale our approach up to obtain a series of models from SegFormer-B0 to SegFormer-B5, reaching significantly better performance and efficiency than previous counterparts. For example, SegFormer-B4 achieves 50.3% mIoU on ADE20K with 64M parameters, being 5x smaller and 2.2% better than the previous best method. Our best model, SegFormer-B5, achieves 84.0% mIoU on Cityscapes validation set and shows excellent zero-shot robustness on Cityscapes-C.

The figure below illustrates the architecture of SegFormer. Taken from the original paper.

This model was contributed by nielsr. The TensorFlow version of the model was contributed by sayakpaul. The original code can be found here.

Usage tips

SegFormer consists of a hierarchical Transformer encoder, and a lightweight all-MLP decoder head.SegformerModel is the hierarchical Transformer encoder (which in the paper is also referred to as Mix Transformer or MiT). SegformerForSemanticSegmentation adds the all-MLP decoder head on top to perform semantic segmentation of images. In addition, there’sSegformerForImageClassification which can be used to - you guessed it - classify images. The authors of SegFormer first pre-trained the Transformer encoder on ImageNet-1k to classify images. Next, they throw away the classification head, and replace it by the all-MLP decode head. Next, they fine-tune the model altogether on ADE20K, Cityscapes and COCO-stuff, which are important benchmarks for semantic segmentation. All checkpoints can be found on the hub.
The quickest way to get started with SegFormer is by checking the example notebooks (which showcase both inference and fine-tuning on custom data). One can also check out the blog post introducing SegFormer and illustrating how it can be fine-tuned on custom data.
TensorFlow users should refer to this repository that shows off-the-shelf inference and fine-tuning.
One can also check out this interactive demo on Hugging Face Spacesto try out a SegFormer model on custom images.
SegFormer works on any input size, as it pads the input to be divisible by config.patch_sizes.
One can use SegformerImageProcessor to prepare images and corresponding segmentation maps for the model. Note that this image processor is fairly basic and does not include all data augmentations used in the original paper. The original preprocessing pipelines (for the ADE20k dataset for instance) can be found here. The most important preprocessing step is that images and segmentation maps are randomly cropped and padded to the same size, such as 512x512 or 640x640, after which they are normalized.
One additional thing to keep in mind is that one can initialize SegformerImageProcessor withdo_reduce_labels set to True or False. In some datasets (like ADE20k), the 0 index is used in the annotated segmentation maps for background. However, ADE20k doesn’t include the “background” class in its 150 labels. Therefore, do_reduce_labels is used to reduce all labels by 1, and to make sure no loss is computed for the background class (i.e. it replaces 0 in the annotated maps by 255, which is the ignore_index of the loss function used by SegformerForSemanticSegmentation). However, other datasets use the 0 index as background class and include this class as part of all labels. In that case, do_reduce_labels should be set toFalse, as loss should also be computed for the background class.
As most models, SegFormer comes in different sizes, the details of which can be found in the table below (taken from Table 7 of the original paper).

Model variant	Depths	Hidden sizes	Decoder hidden size	Params (M)	ImageNet-1k Top 1
MiT-b0	[2, 2, 2, 2]	[32, 64, 160, 256]	256	3.7	70.5
MiT-b1	[2, 2, 2, 2]	[64, 128, 320, 512]	256	14.0	78.7
MiT-b2	[3, 4, 6, 3]	[64, 128, 320, 512]	768	25.4	81.6
MiT-b3	[3, 4, 18, 3]	[64, 128, 320, 512]	768	45.2	83.1
MiT-b4	[3, 8, 27, 3]	[64, 128, 320, 512]	768	62.6	83.6
MiT-b5	[3, 6, 40, 3]	[64, 128, 320, 512]	768	82.0	83.8

Note that MiT in the above table refers to the Mix Transformer encoder backbone introduced in SegFormer. For SegFormer’s results on the segmentation datasets like ADE20k, refer to the paper.

Resources

A list of official Hugging Face and community (indicated by 🌎) resources to help you get started with SegFormer.

SegformerForImageClassification is supported by this example script and notebook.
Image classification task guide

Semantic segmentation:

SegformerForSemanticSegmentation is supported by this example script.
A blog on fine-tuning SegFormer on a custom dataset can be found here.
More demo notebooks on SegFormer (both inference + fine-tuning on a custom dataset) can be found here.
TFSegformerForSemanticSegmentation is supported by this example notebook.
Semantic segmentation task guide

If you’re interested in submitting a resource to be included here, please feel free to open a Pull Request and we’ll review it! The resource should ideally demonstrate something new instead of duplicating an existing resource.

SegFormer (original) (raw)

Overview

Usage tips

Resources

SegformerConfig

class transformers.SegformerConfig

SegformerFeatureExtractor

SegformerImageProcessor

class transformers.SegformerImageProcessor

preprocess

post_process_semantic_segmentation

SegformerModel

class transformers.SegformerModel

forward

SegformerDecodeHead

class transformers.SegformerDecodeHead

forward

SegformerForImageClassification

class transformers.SegformerForImageClassification

forward

SegformerForSemanticSegmentation

class transformers.SegformerForSemanticSegmentation

forward

TFSegformerDecodeHead

class transformers.TFSegformerDecodeHead

call

TFSegformerModel

class transformers.TFSegformerModel

call

TFSegformerForImageClassification

class transformers.TFSegformerForImageClassification

call

TFSegformerForSemanticSegmentation

class transformers.TFSegformerForSemanticSegmentation

call