# A Generative Appearance Model for End-to-end Video Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.11611 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11611/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05210/) (2021)
- [SegGPT: Segmenting Everything In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03284/) (2023)
- [Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01558/) (2021)
- [Matcher: Segment Anything with One Shot Using All-Purpose Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13310/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01153/) (2021)
- [SSTVOS: Sparse Spatiotemporal Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08833/) (2021)
- [Efficient Regional Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12934/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything Meets Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01197/) (2023)
- [SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16268/) (2024)
- [Full-Duplex Strategy for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03151/) (2021)
- [LVOS: A Benchmark for Long-term Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10181/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Memory Matching Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11404/) (2021)
- [SwiftNet: Real-time Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04604/) (2021)
- [Learning Position and Target Consistency for Memory-based Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04329/) (2021)
- [Joint Inductive and Transductive Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03679/) (2021)
- [Visual In-Context Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13601/) (2023)
- [LVOS: A Benchmark for Large-scale Long-term Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19326/) (2024)
- [Prototypical Cross-Attention Networks for Multiple Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11958/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Feature Alignment Network for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08485/) (2022)
- [Reliable Propagation-Correction Modulation for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02853/) (2021)
- [Locality-Aware Inter-and Intra-Video Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Correspondence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14333/) (2022)
- [SWEM: Towards Real-Time Video Object Segmentation with Sequential Weighted Expectation-Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10128/) (2022)
- [VIL-100: A New Dataset and A Baseline Model for Video Instance Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08482/) (2021)
- [Region Aware Video Object Segmentation with Deep Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10258/) (2022)
- [SEGIC: Unleashing the Emergent Correspondence for In-Context Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14671/) (2023)
- [A Simple Image Segmentation Framework via In-Context Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04842/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One of the fundamental challenges in video object segmentation is to find an effective representation of the target and background appearance. The best performing approaches resort to extensive fine-tuning of a convolutional neural network for this purpose. Besides being prohibitively expensive, this strategy cannot be truly trained end-to-end since the online fine-tuning procedure is not integrated into the offline training of the network. To address these issues, we propose a network architecture that learns a powerful representation of the target and background appearance in a single forward pass. The introduced appearance module learns a probabilistic generative model of target and background feature distributions. Given a new image, it predicts the posterior class probabilities, providing a highly discriminative cue, which is processed in later network modules. Both the learning and prediction stages of our appearance module are fully differentiable, enabling true end-to-end training of the entire segmentation pipeline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on three video object segmentation benchmarks. We close the gap to approaches based on online fine-tuning on DAVIS17, while operating at 15 FPS on a single GPU. Furthermore, our method outperforms all published approaches on the large-scale YouTube-VOS dataset.