# FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09513 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09513/

## Key facts

- Cited by 178 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 178)

- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (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)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)
- [Track to Detect and Segment: An Online Multi-Object Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08808/) (2021)
- [Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01558/) (2021)
- [Decoupling Features in Hierarchical Propagation for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09782/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation by Motion Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07658/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01153/) (2021)
- [Modular Interactive Video Object Segmentation: Interaction-to-Mask, Propagation and Difference-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07941/) (2021)
- [SSTVOS: Sparse Spatiotemporal Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08833/) (2021)
- [SG-Net: Spatial Granularity Network for One-Stage Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10284/) (2021)
- [Efficient Regional Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12934/) (2021)
- [Crossover Learning for Fast Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05970/) (2021)
- [SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16268/) (2024)
- [Video K-Net: A Simple, Strong, and Unified Baseline for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04656/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Video Instance Segmentation with a Propose-Reduce Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13746/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Segmenting Moving Objects via an Object-Centric Layered Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02206/) (2022)
- [Do Different Tracking Tasks Require Different Appearance Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02156/) (2021)
- [MOSEv2: A More Challenging Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05630/) (2025)
- [Joint Inductive and Transductive Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03679/) (2021)
- [Breaking the "Object" in Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06200/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Object-Centric Learning for Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06907/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many of the recent successful methods for video object segmentation (VOS) are overly complicated, heavily rely on fine-tuning on the first frame, and/or are slow, and are hence of limited practical use. In this work, we propose FEELVOS as a simple and fast method which does not rely on fine-tuning. In order to segment a video, for each frame FEELVOS uses a semantic pixel-wise embedding together with a global and a local matching mechanism to transfer information from the first frame and from the previous frame of the video to the current frame. In contrast to previous work, our embedding is only used as an internal guidance of a convolutional network. Our novel dynamic segmentation head allows us to train the network, including the embedding, end-to-end for the multiple object segmentation task with a cross entropy loss. We achieve a new state of the art in video object segmentation without fine-tuning with a J&F measure of 71.5% on the DAVIS 2017 validation set. We make our code and models available at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/feelvos.