Modeling temporal visual context across frames is critical for video instance segmentation (VIS) and other video understanding tasks. In this paper, we propose a fast online VIS model named CrossVIS. For temporal information modeling in VIS, we present a novel crossover learning scheme that uses the instance feature in the current frame to pixel-wisely localize the same instance in other frames. Different from previous schemes, crossover learning does not require any additional network parameters for feature enhancement. By integrating with the instance segmentation loss, crossover learning enables efficient cross-frame instance-to-pixel relation learning and brings cost-free improvement during inference. Besides, a global balanced instance embedding branch is proposed for more accurate and more stable online instance association. We conduct extensive experiments on three challenging VIS benchmarks, \ie, YouTube-VIS-2019, OVIS, and YouTube-VIS-2021 to evaluate our methods. To our knowledge, CrossVIS achieves state-of-the-art performance among all online VIS methods and shows a decent trade-off between latency and accuracy. Code will be available to facilitate future research.
Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）；Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司）
Test-time adaptive (TTA) semantic segmentation adapts a source pre-trained image semantic segmentation model to unlabeled batches of target domain test images, different from real-world, where samples arrive one-by-one in an online fashion. To tackle online settings, we propose TransAdapt, a framework that uses transformer and input transformations to improve segmentation performance. Specifically, we pre-train a transformer-based module on a segmentation network that transforms unsupervised segmentation output to a more reliable supervised output, without requiring test-time online training. …
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Recently, transformer-based methods have achieved impressive results on Video Instance Segmentation (VIS). However, most of these top-performing methods run in an offline manner by processing the entire video clip at once to predict instance mask volumes. This makes them incapable of handling the long videos that appear in challenging new video instance segmentation datasets like UVO and OVIS. We propose a fully online transformer-based video instance segmentation model that performs comparably to top offline methods on the YouTube-VIS 2019 benchmark and considerably outperforms them on UVO an…
In Video Instance Segmentation (VIS), current approaches either focus on the quality of the results, by taking the whole video as input and processing it offline; or on speed, by handling it frame by frame at the cost of competitive performance. In this work, we propose an online method that is on par with the performance of the offline counterparts. We introduce a message-passing graph neural network that encodes objects and relates them through time. We additionally propose a novel module to fuse features from the feature pyramid network with residual connections. Our model, trained end-to-e…
In this work we address the task of observing the performance of a semantic segmentation deep neural network (DNN) during online operation, i.e., during inference, which is of high importance in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Here, many high-level decisions rely on such DNNs, which are usually evaluated offline, while their performance in online operation remains unknown. To solve this problem, we propose an improved online performance prediction scheme, building on a recently proposed concept of predicting the primary semantic segmentation task's performance. This ca…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；ByteDance（字节跳动）
In recent years, video instance segmentation (VIS) has been largely advanced by offline models, while online models gradually attracted less attention possibly due to their inferior performance. However, online methods have their inherent advantage in handling long video sequences and ongoing videos while offline models fail due to the limit of computational resources. Therefore, it would be highly desirable if online models can achieve comparable or even better performance than offline models. By dissecting current online models and offline models, we demonstrate that the main cause of the pe…
We propose a new problem formulation and a corresponding evaluation framework to advance research on unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic image segmentation. The overall goal is fostering the development of adaptive learning systems that will continuously learn, without supervision, in ever-changing environments. Typical protocols that study adaptation algorithms for segmentation models are limited to few domains, adaptation happens offline, and human intervention is generally required, at least to annotate data for hyper-parameter tuning. We argue that such constraints are incompatible…
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
Modeling temporal information for both detection and tracking in a unified framework has been proved a promising solution to video instance segmentation (VIS). However, how to effectively incorporate the temporal information into an online model remains an open problem. In this work, we propose a new online VIS paradigm named Instance As Identity (IAI), which models temporal information for both detection and tracking in an efficient way. In detail, IAI employs a novel identification module to predict identification number for tracking instances explicitly. For passing temporal information cro…
Univrses（Univrses公司）；Kudan（Kudan公司）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims at reducing the domain gap between training and testing data and is, in most cases, carried out in offline manner. However, domain changes may occur continuously and unpredictably during deployment (e.g. sudden weather changes). In such conditions, deep neural networks witness dramatic drops in accuracy and offline adaptation may not be enough to contrast it. In this paper, we tackle Online Domain Adaptation (OnDA) for semantic segmentation. We design a pipeline that is robust to continuous domain shifts, either gradual or sudden, and we evaluate it in…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Google AI Perception（谷歌人工智能感知部）；Facebook（脸书）；National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）
Unsupervised video object segmentation is a crucial application in video analysis without knowing any prior information about the objects. It becomes tremendously challenging when multiple objects occur and interact in a given video clip. In this paper, a novel unsupervised video object segmentation approach via distractor-aware online adaptation (DOA) is proposed. DOA models spatial-temporal consistency in video sequences by capturing background dependencies from adjacent frames. Instance proposals are generated by the instance segmentation network for each frame and then selected by motion i…
Recently, transformer-based image segmentation methods have achieved notable success against previous solutions. While for video domains, how to effectively model temporal context with the attention of object instances across frames remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose an online video instance segmentation framework with a novel instance-aware temporal fusion method. We first leverages the representation, i.e., a latent code in the global context (instance code) and CNN feature maps to represent instance- and pixel-level features. Based on this representation, we introduce a crop…
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；LG Electronics（LG电子）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）
For online video instance segmentation (VIS), fully utilizing the information from previous frames in an efficient manner is essential for real-time applications. Most previous methods follow a two-stage approach requiring additional computations such as RPN and RoIAlign, and do not fully exploit the available information in the video for all subtasks in VIS. In this paper, we propose a novel single-stage framework for online VIS built based on the grid structured feature representation. The grid-based features allow us to employ fully convolutional networks for real-time processing, and also …
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Recent transformer-based offline video instance segmentation (VIS) approaches achieve encouraging results and significantly outperform online approaches. However, their reliance on the whole video and the immense computational complexity caused by full Spatio-temporal attention limit them in real-life applications such as processing lengthy videos. In this paper, we propose a single-stage transformer-based efficient online VIS framework named InstanceFormer, which is especially suitable for long and challenging videos. We propose three novel components to model short-term and long-term depende…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Video instance segmentation (VIS) aims at classifying, segmenting and tracking object instances in video sequences. Recent transformer-based neural networks have demonstrated their powerful capability of modeling spatio-temporal correlations for the VIS task. Relying on video- or clip-level input, they suffer from high latency and computational cost. We propose a robust context fusion network to tackle VIS in an online fashion, which predicts instance segmentation frame-by-frame with a few preceding frames. To acquire the precise and temporal-consistent prediction for each frame efficiently, t…
O2V-Mapping: Online Open-Vocabulary Mapping with Neural Implicit Representation
Academy for Engineering & Technology（工程与技术学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Vehicle Safety Technology（智能车辆安全技术国家重点实验室）；School of Future Technology（未来技术学院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Video instance segmentation (VIS) aims at segmenting and tracking objects in videos. Prior methods typically generate frame-level or clip-level object instances first and then associate them by either additional tracking heads or complex instance matching algorithms. This explicit instance association approach increases system complexity and fails to fully exploit temporal cues in videos. In this paper, we design a simple, fast and yet effective query-based framework for online VIS. Relying on an instance query and proposal propagation mechanism with several specially developed components, thi…
Most online multi-object trackers perform object detection stand-alone in a neural net without any input from tracking. In this paper, we present a new online joint detection and tracking model, TraDeS (TRAck to DEtect and Segment), exploiting tracking clues to assist detection end-to-end. TraDeS infers object tracking offset by a cost volume, which is used to propagate previous object features for improving current object detection and segmentation. Effectiveness and superiority of TraDeS are shown on 4 datasets, including MOT (2D tracking), nuScenes (3D tracking), MOTS and Youtube-VIS (insta…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；CVL, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）；PSI, KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；CVG Group at ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉与几何组）；Google Research Zürich（谷歌苏黎世研究院）
This paper presents a real-time online vision framework to jointly recover an indoor scene's 3D structure and semantic label. Given noisy depth maps, a camera trajectory, and 2D semantic labels at train time, the proposed deep neural network based approach learns to fuse the depth over frames with suitable semantic labels in the scene space. Our approach exploits the joint volumetric representation of the depth and semantics in the scene feature space to solve this task. For a compelling online fusion of the semantic labels and geometry in real-time, we introduce an efficient vortex pooling bl…
Recent studies have shown evidence of a significant decline of the Posidonia oceanica (P.O.) meadows on a global scale. The monitoring and mapping of these meadows are fundamental tools for measuring their status. We present an approach based on a deep neural network to automatically perform a high-precision semantic segmentation of P.O. meadows in sea-floor images, offering several improvements over the state of the art techniques. Our network demonstrates outstanding performance over diverse test sets, reaching a precision of 96.57% and an accuracy of 96.81%, surpassing the reliability of la…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；HKUST Shenzhen Research Institute（香港科技大学深圳研究院）
Developing an AI-assisted gland segmentation method from histology images is critical for automatic cancer diagnosis and prognosis; however, the high cost of pixel-level annotations hinders its applications to broader diseases. Existing weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods in computer vision achieve degenerative results for gland segmentation, since the characteristics and problems of glandular datasets are different from general object datasets. We observe that, unlike natural images, the key problem with histology images is the confusion of classes owning to morphological homogene…
Image segmentation is an important step in most visual tasks. While convolutional neural networks have shown to perform well on single image segmentation, to our knowledge, no study has been been done on leveraging recurrent gated architectures for video segmentation. Accordingly, we propose a novel method for online segmentation of video sequences that incorporates temporal data. The network is built from fully convolutional element and recurrent unit that works on a sliding window over the temporal data. We also introduce a novel convolutional gated recurrent unit that preserves the spatial …
This study deals with semantic segmentation of high-resolution (aerial) images where a semantic class label is assigned to each pixel via supervised classification as a basis for automatic map generation. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown impressive performance and have quickly become the de-facto standard for semantic segmentation, with the added benefit that task-specific feature design is no longer necessary. However, a major downside of deep learning methods is that they are extremely data-hungry, thus aggravating the perennial bottleneck of supervised classifi…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
In this work we present a novel solution for Video Instance Segmentation(VIS), that is automatically generating instance level segmentation masks along with object class and tracking them in a video. Our method improves the masks from segmentation and propagation branches in an online manner using the Mask Selection Network (MSN) hence limiting the noise accumulation during mask tracking. We propose an effective design of MSN by using patch-based convolutional neural network. The network is able to distinguish between very subtle differences between the masks and choose the better masks out of…
Sun Asterisk R&D Unit（Sun Asterisk研发部）；Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内理工大学）
Semantic segmentation is an essential task in developing medical image diagnosis systems. However, building an annotated medical dataset is expensive. Thus, semi-supervised methods are significant in this circumstance. In semi-supervised learning, the quality of labels plays a crucial role in model performance. In this work, we present a new pseudo labeling strategy that enhances the quality of pseudo labels used for training student networks. We follow the multi-stage semi-supervised training approach, which trains a teacher model on a labeled dataset and then uses the trained teacher to rend…
Improving Segment Anything on the Fly: Auxiliary Online Learning and Adaptive Fusion for Medical Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University（复旦大学基础医学院数字医学研究中心）；Shanghai Jiaotong University（上海交通大学）；the Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association（亥姆霍兹联合会马克斯·德尔布吕克分子医学中心）
We present a novel method for proposal free instance segmentation that can handle sophisticated object shapes which span large parts of an image and form dense object clusters with crossovers. Our method is based on predicting dense local shape descriptors, which we assemble to form instances. All instances are assembled simultaneously in one go. To our knowledge, our method is the first non-iterative method that yields instances that are composed of learnt shape patches. We evaluate our method on a diverse range of data domains, where it defines the new state of the art on four benchmarks, na…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）；Shenzhen RayShape Medical Technology Co., Ltd（深圳睿影医疗科技有限公司）
Deep segmentation models often face the failure risks when the testing image presents unseen distributions. Improving model robustness against these risks is crucial for the large-scale clinical application of deep models. In this study, inspired by human learning cycle, we propose a novel online reflective learning framework (RefSeg) to improve segmentation robustness. Based on the reflection-on-action conception, our RefSeg firstly drives the deep model to take action to obtain semantic segmentation. Then, RefSeg triggers the model to reflect itself. Because making deep models realize their …
In this paper we propose BlockCopy, a scheme that accelerates pretrained frame-based CNNs to process video more efficiently, compared to standard frame-by-frame processing. To this end, a lightweight policy network determines important regions in an image, and operations are applied on selected regions only, using custom block-sparse convolutions. Features of non-selected regions are simply copied from the preceding frame, reducing the number of computations and latency. The execution policy is trained using reinforcement learning in an online fashion without requiring ground truth annotations…
Semantic segmentation has recently witnessed major progress, where fully convolutional neural networks have shown to perform well. However, most of the previous work focused on improving single image segmentation. To our knowledge, no prior work has made use of temporal video information in a recurrent network. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to implicitly utilize temporal data in videos for online semantic segmentation. The method relies on a fully convolutional network that is embedded into a gated recurrent architecture. This design receives a sequence of consecutive video fram…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉成像工程技术研究中心）
Incremental learning of semantic segmentation has emerged as a promising strategy for visual scene interpretation in the open- world setting. However, it remains challenging to acquire novel classes in an online fashion for the segmentation task, mainly due to its continuously-evolving semantic label space, partial pixelwise ground-truth annotations, and constrained data availability. To ad- dress this, we propose an incremental learning strategy that can fast adapt deep segmentation models without catastrophic forgetting, using a streaming input data with pixel annotations on the novel classe…
Unsupervised domain adaptation in semantic segmentation has been raised to alleviate the reliance on expensive pixel-wise annotations. It leverages a labeled source domain dataset as well as unlabeled target domain images to learn a segmentation network. In this paper, we observe two main issues of the existing domain-invariant learning framework. (1) Being distracted by the feature distribution alignment, the network cannot focus on the segmentation task. (2) Fitting source domain data well would compromise the target domain performance. To address these issues, we propose DecoupleNet that al…
This paper challenges the cross-domain semantic segmentation task, aiming to improve the segmentation accuracy on the unlabeled target domain without incurring additional annotation. Using the pseudo-label-based unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) pipeline, we propose a novel and effective Multiple Fusion Adaptation (MFA) method. MFA basically considers three parallel information fusion strategies, i.e., the cross-model fusion, temporal fusion and a novel online-offline pseudo label fusion. Specifically, the online-offline pseudo label fusion encourages the adaptive training to pay additional…
Mining precise class-aware attention maps, a.k.a, class activation maps, is essential for weakly supervised semantic segmentation. In this paper, we present L2G, a simple online local-to-global knowledge transfer framework for high-quality object attention mining. We observe that classification models can discover object regions with more details when replacing the input image with its local patches. Taking this into account, we first leverage a local classification network to extract attentions from multiple local patches randomly cropped from the input image. Then, we utilize a global networ…
ByteDance（字节跳动）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；UC Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
The success of language Transformers is primarily attributed to the pretext task of masked language modeling (MLM), where texts are first tokenized into semantically meaningful pieces. In this work, we study masked image modeling (MIM) and indicate the advantages and challenges of using a semantically meaningful visual tokenizer. We present a self-supervised framework iBOT that can perform masked prediction with an online tokenizer. Specifically, we perform self-distillation on masked patch tokens and take the teacher network as the online tokenizer, along with self-distillation on the class t…
The random walker (RW) algorithm is used for both image segmentation and registration, and possesses several useful properties that make it popular in medical imaging, such as being globally optimizable, allowing user interaction, and providing uncertainty information. The RW algorithm defines a weighted graph over an image and uses the graph's Laplacian matrix to regularize its solutions. This regularization reduces to solving a large system of equations, which may be excessively time consuming in some applications, such as when interacting with a human user. Techniques have been developed th…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
This paper proposes an end-to-end trainable network, SegFlow, for simultaneously predicting pixel-wise object segmentation and optical flow in videos. The proposed SegFlow has two branches where useful information of object segmentation and optical flow is propagated bidirectionally in a unified framework. The segmentation branch is based on a fully convolutional network, which has been proved effective in image segmentation task, and the optical flow branch takes advantage of the FlowNet model. The unified framework is trained iteratively offline to learn a generic notion, and fine-tuned onli…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Five AI（Five AI公司）
Unsupervised video object segmentation has often been tackled by methods based on recurrent neural networks and optical flow. Despite their complexity, these kinds of approaches tend to favour short-term temporal dependencies and are thus prone to accumulating inaccuracies, which cause drift over time. Moreover, simple (static) image segmentation models, alone, can perform competitively against these methods, which further suggests that the way temporal dependencies are modelled should be reconsidered. Motivated by these observations, in this paper we explore simple yet effective strategies to…
We propose a method for high-performance semantic image segmentation (or semantic pixel labelling) based on very deep residual networks, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance. A few design factors are carefully considered to this end. We make the following contributions. (i) First, we evaluate different variations of a fully convolutional residual network so as to find the best configuration, including the number of layers, the resolution of feature maps, and the size of field-of-view. Our experiments show that further enlarging the field-of-view and increasing the resolution of feat…
The handling of long videos with complex and occluded sequences has recently emerged as a new challenge in the video instance segmentation (VIS) community. However, existing methods have limitations in addressing this challenge. We argue that the biggest bottleneck in current approaches is the discrepancy between training and inference. To effectively bridge this gap, we propose a Generalized framework for VIS, namely GenVIS, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks without designing complicated architectures or requiring extra post-processing. The key contribution …
Hubei University of Technology（湖北工业大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Affinity graph-based segmentation methods have become a major trend in computer vision. The performance of these methods relies on the constructed affinity graph, with particular emphasis on the neighborhood topology and pairwise affinities among superpixels. Due to the advantages of assimilating different graphs, a multi-scale fusion graph has a better performance than a single graph with single-scale. However, these methods ignore the noise from images which influences the accuracy of pairwise similarities. Multi-scale combinatorial grouping and graph fusion also generate a higher computatio…
Fully convolutional networks (FCNs), including UNet and VNet, are widely-used network architectures for semantic segmentation in recent studies. However, conventional FCN is typically trained by the cross-entropy or Dice loss, which only calculates the error between predictions and ground-truth labels for pixels individually. This often results in non-smooth neighborhoods in the predicted segmentation. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework, with the first stage to quickly localize the prostate region and the second stage to precisely segment the prostate by a multi-task UNe…
CTVIS: Consistent Training for Online Video Instance Segmentation
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；Northwest A&F University（西北农林科技大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Swansea University（斯旺西大学）
