Semantic Image Segmentation with SegFormer: A Practical Guide

Author(s): Souradip Pal

Originally published on Towards AI.

Have you ever wondered how self-driving cars can tell the difference between a pedestrian and a lamppost? Or how medical software can identify tumors with pinpoint accuracy?

The answer might shock you: pixel-perfect image understanding through semantic segmentation.

Unlike traditional object detection, which just draws boxes, semantic segmentation classifies every single pixel in your image.

And the results? Nothing short of revolutionary.

Think of semantic segmentation as giving your computer superhuman vision.

It doesn’t just see objects — it understands boundaries, textures, and materials at the pixel level.

This technology is transforming everything from autonomous vehicles to medical diagnostics.

First, let’s install the necessary packages:

# Install required packages!pip install transformers datasets accelerate evaluate!pip install torch torchvision!pip install matplotlib opencv-python

Next, we import the required libraries:

import torchimport numpy as npimport matplotlib.pyplot as pltfrom transformers import AutoFeatureExtractor, AutoModelForSemanticSegmentationfrom PIL import Imageimport requestsfrom io import BytesIOimport cv2

Your model’s performance can skyrocket with the right hardware:

# Check if GPU is availabledevice = torch.device("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")print(f"Using device: {device}")

What happens when you run this code might surprise you, especially if you’ve been struggling with slow inference times.

Ready to tap into AI that can see better than humans?

# Load a pre-trained semantic segmentation modelmodel_name = "nvidia/segformer-b0-finetuned-ade-512-512"# Load the feature extractor and modelfeature_extractor = AutoFeatureExtractor.from_pretrained(model_name)model = AutoModelForSemanticSegmentation.from_pretrained(model_name)# Move model to the appropriate devicemodel = model.to(device)

What if I told you there’s a breakthrough AI architecture that combines the best of two… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI