mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Deep Watershed Transform for Instance Segmentation

arXiv 1611.08303 ↗First posted 24 Nov 2016cs.CVcited by 77

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Most contemporary approaches to instance segmentation use complex pipelines involving conditional random fields, recurrent neural networks, object proposals, or template matching schemes. In our paper, we present a simple yet powerful end-to-end convolutional neural network to tackle this task. Our approach combines intuitions from the classical watershed transform and modern deep learning to produce an energy map of the image where object instances are unambiguously represented as basins in the energy map. We then perform a cut at a single energy level to directly yield connected components corresponding to object instances. Our model more than doubles the performance of the state-of-the-art on the challenging Cityscapes Instance Level Segmentation task.

Key facts. Cited by 77 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2016.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 31; 2022: 21; 2023: 7; 2024: 5; 2025: 8; 2026: 5.

77 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2021Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentationcited by 242
  2. 2021K-Net: Towards Unified Image Segmentationcited by 211
  3. 2022RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectorscited by 192
  4. 2021Hierarchical Aggregation for 3D Instance Segmentationcited by 126
  5. 2021MSeg: A Composite Dataset for Multi-domain Semantic Segmentationcited by 122
  6. 2021GENESIS-V2: Inferring Unordered Object Representations without Iterative Refinementcited by 109
  7. 2021Deep Occlusion-Aware Instance Segmentation with Overlapping BiLayerscited by 104
  8. 2021Pointly-Supervised Instance Segmentationcited by 83
  9. 2022CMT-DeepLab: Clustering Mask Transformers for Panoptic Segmentationcited by 60
  10. 2021DiscoBox: Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation and Semantic Correspondence from Box Supervisioncited by 59
  11. 2023Understanding metric-related pitfalls in image analysis validationcited by 57
  12. 2021Semantics for Robotic Mapping, Perception and Interaction: A Surveycited by 56
38 more
  1. 2021Incremental Few-Shot Instance Segmentationcited by 49
  2. 2021Look Closer to Segment Better: Boundary Patch Refinement for Instance Segmentationcited by 43
  3. 2021LaneAF: Robust Multi-Lane Detection with Affinity Fieldscited by 41
  4. 2023CLUSTSEG: Clustering for Universal Segmentationcited by 32
  5. 2022OSFormer: One-Stage Camouflaged Instance Segmentation with Transformerscited by 30
  6. 2021Instance and Panoptic Segmentation Using Conditional Convolutionscited by 19
  7. 2021TA-Net: Topology-Aware Network for Gland Segmentationcited by 17
  8. 2022Learning Equivariant Segmentation with Instance-Unique Queryingcited by 17
  9. 2021Unknown Object Segmentation from Stereo Imagescited by 16
  10. 2021A^2-FPN: Attention Aggregation based Feature Pyramid Network for Instance Segmentationcited by 15
  11. 2022Panoramic Panoptic Segmentation: Insights Into Surrounding Parsing for Mobile Agents via Unsupervised Contrastive Learningcited by 14
  12. 20213D Instance Segmentation of MVS Buildingscited by 12
  13. 2022kMaX-DeepLab: k-means Mask Transformercited by 12
  14. 2021Sparse Object-level Supervision for Instance Segmentation with Pixel Embeddingscited by 10
  15. 2021VideoClick: Video Object Segmentation with a Single Clickcited by 8
  16. 2021Unsupervised domain adaptation for clinician pose estimation and instance segmentation in the operating roomcited by 7
  17. 2022Segmentation in large-scale cellular electron microscopy with deep learning: A literature surveycited by 6
  18. 2022Beyond mAP: Towards better evaluation of instance segmentationcited by 6
  19. 2021Semantic Attention and Scale Complementary Network for Instance Segmentation in Remote Sensing Imagescited by 5
  20. 2021SDTP: Semantic-aware Decoupled Transformer Pyramid for Dense Image Predictioncited by 5
  21. 2022Occlusion-Aware Instance Segmentation via BiLayer Network Architecturescited by 5
  22. 2022Instance Segmentation of Dense and Overlapping Objects via Layeringcited by 5
  23. 2021Combining Deep Learning and Mathematical Morphology for Historical Map Segmentationcited by 4
  24. 2021BezierSeg: Parametric Shape Representation for Fast Object Segmentation in Medical Imagescited by 4
  25. 2021Object-Guided Instance Segmentation With Auxiliary Feature Refinement for Biological Imagescited by 3
  26. 2022Learn Fast, Segment Well: Fast Object Segmentation Learning on the iCub Robotcited by 3
  27. 2023Structure-Preserving Instance Segmentation via Skeleton-Aware Distance Transformcited by 3
  28. 2021Enforcing Morphological Information in Fully Convolutional Networks to Improve Cell Instance Segmentation in Fluorescence Microscopy Imagescited by 2
  29. 2021Split GCN: Effective Interactive Annotation for Segmentation of Disconnected Instancecited by 2
  30. 2022H-EMD: A Hierarchical Earth Mover's Distance Method for Instance Segmentationcited by 2
  31. 2022Semantic Segmentation-Assisted Instance Feature Fusion for Multi-Level 3D Part Instance Segmentationcited by 2
  32. 2024ProtoSeg: A Prototype-Based Point Cloud Instance Segmentation Methodcited by 2
  33. 2025Pseudo-Label Quality Decoupling and Correction for Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentationcited by 2
  34. 2025Demeter: A Parametric Model of Crop Plant Morphology from the Real Worldcited by 2
  35. 2026RL-AWB: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Auto White Balance Correction in Low-Light Night-time Scenescited by 2
  36. 2026Breaking the Resource Wall: Geometry-Guided Sequence Modeling for Efficient Semantic Segmentationcited by 2
  37. 2022Automated processing of X-ray computed tomography images via panoptic segmentation for modeling woven composite textilescited by 1
  38. 2022ConsInstancy: Learning Instance Representations for Semi-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation of Concrete Aggregate Particlescited by 1

50 most cited of 77 All 77 (JSON)