A Generalized Framework for Video Instance Segmentation

Recently, handling long videos of complex and occluded sequences has emerged as a new challenge in the video instance segmentation (VIS) community. However, existing methods show limitations in addressing the challenge. We argue that the biggest bottleneck in current approaches is the discrepancy between the training and the inference. To effectively bridge the gap, we propose a \textbf{Gen}eralized framework for \textbf{VIS}, namely \textbf{GenVIS}, that achieves the state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks without designing complicated architectures or extra post-processing. The key contribution of GenVIS is the learning strategy. Specifically, we propose a query-based training pipeline for sequential learning, using a novel target label assignment strategy. To further fill the remaining gaps, we introduce a memory that effectively acquires information from previous states. Thanks to the new perspective, which focuses on building relationships between separate frames or clips, GenVIS can be flexibly executed in both online and semi-online manner. We evaluate our methods on popular VIS benchmarks, YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS), achieving state-of-the-art results. Notably, we greatly outperform the state-of-the-art on the long VIS benchmark (OVIS), improving 5.6 AP with ResNet-50 backbone. Code will be available at https://github.com/miranheo/GenVIS.