Image segmentation is the process of assigning a class label (such as person, car, or tree) to each pixel of an image. You can think of it as classification, but on a pixel level—instead of classifying the entire image under one label, we'll classify each pixel separately. There are two types of segmentation:
- Semantic segmentation: This assigns a class to each pixel, but doesn't differentiate between object instances. For example, the middle image in the following screenshot shows a semantic segmentation mask, where the pixels of each vehicle have the same value. Semantic segmentation can tell us that a pixel is part of a vehicle, but cannot make a distinction between two vehicles.
- Instance segmentation: This assigns a class to each pixel and differentiates between object instances. For example, the image on the right in the following...
