Foundation models have emerged as powerful tools across various domains including language, vision, and multimodal tasks. While prior works have addressed unsupervised image segmentation, they significantly lag behind supervised models. In this paper, we use a diffusion UNet encoder as a foundation vision encoder and introduce DiffCut, an unsupervised zero-shot segmentation method that solely harnesses the output features from the final self-attention block. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that the utilization of these diffusion features in a graph based segmentation algorithm, significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on zero-shot segmentation. Specifically, we leverage a recursive Normalized Cut algorithm that softly regulates the granularity of detected objects and produces well-defined segmentation maps that precisely capture intricate image details. Our work highlights the remarkably accurate semantic knowledge embedded within diffusion UNet encoders that could then serve as foundation vision encoders for downstream tasks.
As good candidates for a task of unsupervised segmentation are expected to be semantically coherent, we conduct a comparison between different families of foundation models on their internal alignment at the patch-level.
Selected models include text-to-image DMs (SSD-1B), text-aligned contrastive models (CLIP, SigLIP) and self-supervised models (DINO, DINOv2).
@misc{couairon2024zeroshot,
title={Zero-Shot Image Segmentation via Recursive Normalized Cut on Diffusion Features},
author={Paul Couairon and Mustafa Shukor and Jean-Emmanuel Haugeard and Matthieu Cord and Nicolas Thome},
year={2024},
eprint={2406.02842},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV}
}