Lucid Data Dreaming for Video Object Segmentation

Convolutional networks reach top quality in pixel-level video object segmentation but require a large amount of training data (1k~100k) to deliver such results. We propose a new training strategy which achieves state-of-the-art results across three evaluation datasets while using 20x~1000x less annotated data than competing methods. Our approach is suitable for both single and multiple object segmentation. Instead of using large training sets hoping to generalize across domains, we generate in-domain training data using the provided annotation on the first frame of each video to synthesize ("lucid dream") plausible future video frames. In-domain per-video training data allows us to train high quality appearance- and motion-based models, as well as tune the post-processing stage. This approach allows to reach competitive results even when training from only a single annotated frame, without ImageNet pre-training. Our results indicate that using a larger training set is not automatically better, and that for the video object segmentation task a smaller training set that is closer to the target domain is more effective. This changes the mindset regarding how many training samples and general "objectness" knowledge are required for the video object segmentation task.Comment: Accepted in International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV

OVSNet : Towards One-Pass Real-Time Video Object Segmentation

Video object segmentation aims at accurately segmenting the target object regions across consecutive frames. It is technically challenging for coping with complicated factors (e.g., shape deformations, occlusion and out of the lens). Recent approaches have largely solved them by using backforth re-identification and bi-directional mask propagation. However, their methods are extremely slow and only support offline inference, which in principle cannot be applied in real time. Motivated by this observation, we propose a efficient detection-based paradigm for video object segmentation. We propose an unified One-Pass Video Segmentation framework (OVS-Net) for modeling spatial-temporal representation in a unified pipeline, which seamlessly integrates object detection, object segmentation, and object re-identification. The proposed framework lends itself to one-pass inference that effectively and efficiently performs video object segmentation. Moreover, we propose a maskguided attention module for modeling the multi-scale object boundary and multi-level feature fusion. Experiments on the challenging DAVIS 2017 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework with comparable performance to the state-of-the-art, and the great efficiency about 11.5 FPS towards pioneering real-time work to our knowledge, more than 5 times faster than other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

MHP-VOS: Multiple Hypotheses Propagation for Video Object Segmentation

We address the problem of semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS), where the masks of objects of interests are given in the first frame of an input video. To deal with challenging cases where objects are occluded or missing, previous work relies on greedy data association strategies that make decisions for each frame individually. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to defer the decision making for a target object in each frame, until a global view can be established with the entire video being taken into consideration. Our approach is in the same spirit as Multiple Hypotheses Tracking (MHT) methods, making several critical adaptations for the VOS problem. We employ the bounding box (bbox) hypothesis for tracking tree formation, and the multiple hypotheses are spawned by propagating the preceding bbox into the detected bbox proposals within a gated region starting from the initial object mask in the first frame. The gated region is determined by a gating scheme which takes into account a more comprehensive motion model rather than the simple Kalman filtering model in traditional MHT. To further design more customized algorithms tailored for VOS, we develop a novel mask propagation score instead of the appearance similarity score that could be brittle due to large deformations. The mask propagation score, together with the motion score, determines the affinity between the hypotheses during tree pruning. Finally, a novel mask merging strategy is employed to handle mask conflicts between objects. Extensive experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, especially in the case of object missing.Comment: accepted to CVPR 2019 as oral presentatio