Robust and Consistent Online Video Instance Segmentation via Instance Mask Propagation

Recent advancements in online Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) methods show notable performance improvements across benchmarks. However, the leading methods in the tracking-by-detection paradigm often result in temporally inconsistent predictions at both instance-level and pixel-level that lead to visually unsatisfactory outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose RoCoVIS, a simple yet effective approach that integrates segmentation and tracking to provide consistent online VIS. Our approach is an end-to-end sequential learning where object queries are propagated through mask predictions, improving the accuracy of temporal instance mapping at the pixel level. Additionally, we propose a new label assignment criterion in harmony with our approach. We also examine the limitations and challenges presented by the current standard evaluation protocol (AP) and suggest adopting additional metrics, Tube-Boundary AP and AP_Pool. RoCoVIS demonstrates superior performance on challenging VIS benchmarks with a Swin-L backbone and shows competitive results when employing a ResNet-50 backbone. By employing Tube-Boundary AP and AP_Pool as metrics to measure mask accuracy and consistency, RoCoVIS outperforms its counterpart, GenVIS, on the HQ-YTVIS and VIPSeg.