Layer-Wise Mutual Information Meta-Learning Network for Few-Shot Segmentation

The goal of few-shot segmentation (FSS) is to segment unlabeled images belonging to previously unseen classes using only a limited number of labeled images. The main objective is to transfer label information effectively from support images to query images. In this study, we introduce a novel meta-learning framework called layer-wise mutual information (LayerMI), which enhances the propagation of label information by maximizing the mutual information (MI) between support and query features at each layer. Our approach involves the utilization of a LayerMI Block based on information-theoretic co-clustering. This block performs online co-clustering on the joint probability distribution obtained from each layer, generating a target-specific attention map. The LayerMI Block can be seamlessly integrated into the meta-learning framework and applied to all convolutional neural network (CNN) layers without altering the training objectives. Notably, the LayerMI Block not only maximizes MI between support and query features but also facilitates internal clustering within the image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LayerMI significantly enhances the performance of baseline and achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on three challenging benchmarks: PASCAL- 5ⁱ , COCO- 20ⁱ , and FSS-1000.