Learning Attribute-aware Representations for Few-shot Scene Text Segmentation

Abstract

Supervised scene text segmentation has achieved notable progress in recent years. However, its development is largely constrained by the scarcity of high-quality datasets and the high cost of pixel-level annotations. To address this limitation, we explore few-shot learning for text segmentation and propose TSAL, an attribute-aware few-shot framework that leverages a pre-trained CLIP model to learn transferable text attributes for segmentation. Our framework comprises two complementary branches: I) a Visual-Guided Branch that extracts semantic and textural features for foreground text and background regions, respectively, and II) an Adaptive Prompt-Guided Branch that employs learnable prompt templates to capture diverse text attributes with minimal data dependence. To effectively align textual attributes with visual representations, we further introduce an Adaptive Feature Alignment~(AFA) module, which aligns learnable attribute tokens with visual features and prompt prototypes, enabling the model to capture both general and distinctive textual characteristics. As a result, TSAL can accurately segment text regions using only a few annotated samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across several public text segmentation benchmarks under few-shot settings and exhibits strong generalization to text-related tasks.