# Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00607 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/

## Key facts

- Cited by 438 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 438)

- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)
- [3D Reconstruction with Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16061/) (2024)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [Keeping Your Eye on the Ball: Trajectory Attention in Video Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05392/) (2021)
- [ViTAE: Vision Transformer Advanced by Exploring Intrinsic Inductive Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03348/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05210/) (2021)
- [Tracking Anything with Decoupled Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03903/) (2023)
- [SegGPT: Segmenting Everything In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03284/) (2023)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Streaming Long Video Understanding with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16009/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Simple Unsupervised Object-Centric Learning for Complex and Naturalistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14065/) (2022)
- [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)
- [VISA: Reasoning Video Object Segmentation via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11325/) (2024)
- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [MeMOT: Multi-Object Tracking with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16761/) (2022)
- [HourVideo: 1-Hour Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04998/) (2024)
- [SSTVOS: Sparse Spatiotemporal Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08833/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel solution for semi-supervised video object segmentation. By the nature of the problem, available cues (e.g. video frame(s) with object masks) become richer with the intermediate predictions. However, the existing methods are unable to fully exploit this rich source of information. We resolve the issue by leveraging memory networks and learn to read relevant information from all available sources. In our framework, the past frames with object masks form an external memory, and the current frame as the query is segmented using the mask information in the memory. Specifically, the query and the memory are densely matched in the feature space, covering all the space-time pixel locations in a feed-forward fashion. Contrast to the previous approaches, the abundant use of the guidance information allows us to better handle the challenges such as appearance changes and occlussions. We validate our method on the latest benchmark sets and achieved the state-of-the-art performance (overall score of 79.4 on Youtube-VOS val set, J of 88.7 and 79.2 on DAVIS 2016/2017 val set respectively) while having a fast runtime (0.16 second/frame on DAVIS 2016 val set).