Self-Supervised Learning for Image Segmentation: A Comprehensive Survey

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13584v1
• Date: Mon, 19 May 2025 17:47:32 GMT
• Title: Self-Supervised Learning for Image Segmentation: A Comprehensive Survey
• Authors: Thangarajah Akilan, Nusrat Jahan, Wandong Zhang,
• Abstract summary: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become a powerful machine learning (ML) paradigm for solving several practical downstream computer vision problems.<n>This survey thoroughly investigates over 150 recent image segmentation articles, particularly focusing on SSL.<n>It provides a practical categorization of pretext tasks, downstream tasks, and commonly used benchmark datasets for image segmentation research.
• Score: 8.139668811376822
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Supervised learning demands large amounts of precisely annotated data to achieve promising results. Such data curation is labor-intensive and imposes significant overhead regarding time and costs. Self-supervised learning (SSL) partially overcomes these limitations by exploiting vast amounts of unlabeled data and creating surrogate (pretext or proxy) tasks to learn useful representations without manual labeling. As a result, SSL has become a powerful machine learning (ML) paradigm for solving several practical downstream computer vision problems, such as classification, detection, and segmentation. Image segmentation is the cornerstone of many high-level visual perception applications, including medical imaging, intelligent transportation, agriculture, and surveillance. Although there is substantial research potential for developing advanced algorithms for SSL-based semantic segmentation, a comprehensive study of existing methodologies is essential to trace advances and guide emerging researchers. This survey thoroughly investigates over 150 recent image segmentation articles, particularly focusing on SSL. It provides a practical categorization of pretext tasks, downstream tasks, and commonly used benchmark datasets for image segmentation research. It concludes with key observations distilled from a large body of literature and offers future directions to make this research field more accessible and comprehensible for readers.

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