# Video Instance Segmentation with a Propose-Reduce Paradigm

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.13746 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13746/

## Key facts

- Cited by 74 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04804/) (2019)
- [SOLO: Segmenting Objects by Locations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04488/) (2019)
- [Mask Scoring R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00241/) (2019)
- [One-Shot Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05198/) (2016)
- [Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05424/) (2016)
- [CenterMask : Real-Time Anchor-Free Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06667/) (2019)
- [PolarMask: Single Shot Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13226/) (2019)
- [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10080/) (2016)
- [FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09513/) (2019)
- [Learning Video Object Segmentation from Static Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02646/) (2016)
- [Classifying, Segmenting, and Tracking Object Instances in Video with Mask Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04573/) (2019)
- [STEm-Seg: Spatio-temporal Embeddings for Instance Segmentation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08429/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [Tracking Anything with Decoupled Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03903/) (2023)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01153/) (2021)
- [Video Instance Segmentation using Inter-Frame Communication Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03299/) (2021)
- [A Generalist Framework for Panoptic Segmentation of Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06366/) (2022)
- [SeqFormer: Sequential Transformer for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08275/) (2021)
- [In Defense of Online Models for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10661/) (2022)
- [Video K-Net: A Simple, Strong, and Unified Baseline for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04656/) (2022)
- [Temporally Efficient Vision Transformer for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08412/) (2022)
- [A Generalized Framework for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08834/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Object-Centric Learning for Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06907/) (2023)
- [Towards Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01715/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Cross-modal Interaction from a Top-down Perspective for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01061/) (2021)
- [TubeFormer-DeepLab: Video Mask Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15361/) (2022)
- [Efficient Video Instance Segmentation via Tracklet Query and Proposal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01853/) (2022)
- [TarViS: A Unified Approach for Target-based Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02657/) (2023)
- [Moving Object Segmentation: All You Need Is SAM (and Flow)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12389/) (2024)
- [VISOLO: Grid-Based Space-Time Aggregation for Efficient Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04177/) (2021)
- [Video Mask Transfiner for High-Quality Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14012/) (2022)
- [Tube-Link: A Flexible Cross Tube Framework for Universal Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12782/) (2023)
- [Mask-Free Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15904/) (2023)
- [Semantics Meets Temporal Correspondence: Self-supervised Object-centric Learning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09951/) (2023)
- [OmniTracker: Unifying Object Tracking by Tracking-with-Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12079/) (2023)
- [TCOVIS: Temporally Consistent Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11857/) (2023)
- [Unified Embedding Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07427/) (2024)
- [UVOSAM: A Mask-free Paradigm for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation via Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12659/) (2023)
- [Hybrid Instance-aware Temporal Fusion for Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01695/) (2021)
- [STC: Spatio-Temporal Contrastive Learning for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03747/) (2022)
- [InstanceFormer: An Online Video Instance Segmentation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10547/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video instance segmentation (VIS) aims to segment and associate all instances of predefined classes for each frame in videos. Prior methods usually obtain segmentation for a frame or clip first, and merge the incomplete results by tracking or matching. These methods may cause error accumulation in the merging step. Contrarily, we propose a new paradigm -- Propose-Reduce, to generate complete sequences for input videos by a single step. We further build a sequence propagation head on the existing image-level instance segmentation network for long-term propagation. To ensure robustness and high recall of our proposed framework, multiple sequences are proposed where redundant sequences of the same instance are reduced. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on two representative benchmark datasets -- we obtain 47.6% in terms of AP on YouTube-VIS validation set and 70.4% for J&F on DAVIS-UVOS validation set. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/ProposeReduce.
