Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation via Ordinary Differential Equations over Time Intervals

Abstract: Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) not only enables the segmentation of unseen categories with very limited samples, but also improves cross-domain generalization ability within the few-shot segmentation framework. Currently, existing CD-FSS studies typically design multiple independent modules to enhance the cross-domain generalization ability of feature representations. However, the independence among these modules hinders the effective flow of knowledge, making it difficult to fully leverage their collective potential. In contrast, this paper proposes an all-in-one module based on ordinary differential equations and Fourier transform, resulting in a structurally concise method--Few-Shot Segmentation over Time Intervals (FSS-TIs). FSS-TIs assumes the existence of an ODE relationship between the spectra (including amplitude and phase spectra) of domain-specific features and domain-agnostic features. This ODE formulation yields an iterative transformation process along a sequence of time intervals, while simultaneously applying affine transformations with randomized perturbations to the spectra. In doing so, the exploration of domain-agnostic feature representation spaces and the simulation of diverse potential target-domain distributions are reformulated as an optimization process over the intrinsic parameters of the ODE. Moreover, we strictly constrain the support-sample selection during target-domain fine-tuning so that it is consistent with the requirements of real-world few-shot segmentation tasks. For evaluation, we introduce five datasets from substantially different domains and define two sets of cross-domain few-shot segmentation tasks to comprehensively analyze the performance of FSS-TIs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of FSS-TIs over existing CD-FSS methods, and in-depth ablation studies further validate the cross-domain adaptability of FSS-TIs.