# Video Instance Segmentation using Inter-Frame Communication Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03299 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03299/

## Key facts

- Cited by 105 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Video Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14503/) (2020)
- [Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04804/) (2019)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [Conditional Convolutions for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05664/) (2020)
- [Multiple Object Tracking: A Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7618/) (2014)
- [BlendMask: Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00309/) (2020)
- [End-to-end people detection in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04878/) (2015)
- [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)
- [SipMask: Spatial Information Preservation for Fast Image and Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14772/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 105)

- [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)
- [Mask2Former for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10764/) (2021)
- [Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with MLLM for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04001/) (2025)
- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [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)
- [VITA: Video Instance Segmentation via Object Token Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04403/) (2022)
- [MinVIS: A Minimal Video Instance Segmentation Framework without Video-based Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02245/) (2022)
- [Video K-Net: A Simple, Strong, and Unified Baseline for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04656/) (2022)
- [DVIS: Decoupled Video Instance Segmentation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03413/) (2023)
- [General Object Foundation Model for Images and Videos at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09158/) (2023)
- [Video Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05991/) (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)
- [CTVIS: Consistent Training for Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12616/) (2023)
- [Matching Anything by Segmenting Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04221/) (2024)
- [Towards Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01715/) (2023)
- [TubeFormer-DeepLab: Video Mask Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15361/) (2022)
- [TarViS: A Unified Approach for Target-based Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02657/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Temporal Collection and Distribution for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03473/) (2023)
- [Video-kMaX: A Simple Unified Approach for Online and Near-Online Video Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04694/) (2023)
- [Tube-Link: A Flexible Cross Tube Framework for Universal Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12782/) (2023)
- [Audio-Visual Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18709/) (2023)
- [Mask-Free Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15904/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel end-to-end solution for video instance segmentation (VIS) based on transformers. Recently, the per-clip pipeline shows superior performance over per-frame methods leveraging richer information from multiple frames. However, previous per-clip models require heavy computation and memory usage to achieve frame-to-frame communications, limiting practicality. In this work, we propose Inter-frame Communication Transformers (IFC), which significantly reduces the overhead for information-passing between frames by efficiently encoding the context within the input clip. Specifically, we propose to utilize concise memory tokens as a mean of conveying information as well as summarizing each frame scene. The features of each frame are enriched and correlated with other frames through exchange of information between the precisely encoded memory tokens. We validate our method on the latest benchmark sets and achieved the state-of-the-art performance (AP 44.6 on YouTube-VIS 2019 val set using the offline inference) while having a considerably fast runtime (89.4 FPS). Our method can also be applied to near-online inference for processing a video in real-time with only a small delay. The code will be made available.