Pointly-Supervised Instance Segmentation

We propose point-based instance-level annotation, a new form of weak supervision for instance segmentation. It combines the standard bounding box annotation with labeled points that are uniformly sampled inside each bounding box. We show that the existing instance segmentation models developed for full mask supervision, like Mask R-CNN, can be seamlessly trained with the point-based annotation without any major modifications. In our experiments, Mask R-CNN models trained on COCO, PASCAL VOC, Cityscapes, and LVIS with only 10 annotated points per object achieve 94%--98% of their fully-supervised performance. The new point-based annotation is approximately 5 times faster to collect than object masks, making high-quality instance segmentation more accessible for new data. Inspired by the new annotation form, we propose a modification to PointRend instance segmentation module. For each object, the new architecture, called Implicit PointRend, generates parameters for a function that makes the final point-level mask prediction. Implicit PointRend is more straightforward and uses a single point-level mask loss. Our experiments show that the new module is more suitable for the proposed point-based supervision.