TSAM: Temporal SAM Augmented with Multimodal Prompts for Referring Audio-Visual Segmentation

Referring audio-visual segmentation (Ref-AVS) aims to segment objects within audio-visual scenes using multimodal cues embedded in text expressions. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized visual segmentation, its applicability to Ref-AVS, where multimodal cues act as novel prompts, remains unexplored. SAM’s limitation to single-frame segmentation also hinders its ability to capture essential temporal context needed for multi-frame audio-visual segmentation. To address this gap, we propose TSAM, a novel extension of SAM designed to leverage multimodal cues for precise segmentation in dynamic audio-visual scenes. TSAM enhances SAM’s image encoder with a temporal modeling branch, enabling spatio-temporal learning and deep multimodal fusion across video frames, while retaining SAM’s pre-trained knowledge. Additionally, TSAM replaces SAM’s user-interactive prompting mechanism with sparse and dense data-driven prompts, enabling more effective integration of audio-visual inputs and reference text expressions. Extensive experiments on the Ref-AVS dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed TSAM over state-of-the-art methods, underscoring its effectiveness in accurately segmenting objects in audio-visual scenes guided by text-based multimodal cues and its strong generalization to unseen objects.