Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ding, Henghui, Tang, Song, He, Shuting, Liu, Chang, Wu, Zuxuan, Jiang, Yu-Gang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ding, Henghui
Tang, Song
He, Shuting
Liu, Chang
Wu, Zuxuan
Jiang, Yu-Gang
author_facet Ding, Henghui
Tang, Song
He, Shuting
Liu, Chang
Wu, Zuxuan
Jiang, Yu-Gang
contents Multimodal referring segmentation aims to segment target objects in visual scenes, such as images, videos, and 3D scenes, based on referring expressions in text or audio format. This task plays a crucial role in practical applications requiring accurate object perception based on user instructions. Over the past decade, it has gained significant attention in the multimodal community, driven by advances in convolutional neural networks, transformers, and large language models, all of which have substantially improved multimodal perception capabilities. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of multimodal referring segmentation. We begin by introducing this field's background, including problem definitions and commonly used datasets. Next, we summarize a unified meta architecture for referring segmentation and review representative methods across three primary visual scenes, including images, videos, and 3D scenes. We further discuss Generalized Referring Expression (GREx) methods to address the challenges of real-world complexity, along with related tasks and practical applications. Extensive performance comparisons on standard benchmarks are also provided. We continually track related works at https://github.com/henghuiding/Awesome-Multimodal-Referring-Segmentation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00265
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey
Ding, Henghui
Tang, Song
He, Shuting
Liu, Chang
Wu, Zuxuan
Jiang, Yu-Gang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal referring segmentation aims to segment target objects in visual scenes, such as images, videos, and 3D scenes, based on referring expressions in text or audio format. This task plays a crucial role in practical applications requiring accurate object perception based on user instructions. Over the past decade, it has gained significant attention in the multimodal community, driven by advances in convolutional neural networks, transformers, and large language models, all of which have substantially improved multimodal perception capabilities. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of multimodal referring segmentation. We begin by introducing this field's background, including problem definitions and commonly used datasets. Next, we summarize a unified meta architecture for referring segmentation and review representative methods across three primary visual scenes, including images, videos, and 3D scenes. We further discuss Generalized Referring Expression (GREx) methods to address the challenges of real-world complexity, along with related tasks and practical applications. Extensive performance comparisons on standard benchmarks are also provided. We continually track related works at https://github.com/henghuiding/Awesome-Multimodal-Referring-Segmentation.
title Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00265