# Exploring the Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation Problem from a Cyclic Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01323 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01323/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2021.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [Learning Correspondence from the Cycle-Consistency of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07593/) (2019)
- [Space-Time Correspondence as a Contrastive Random Walk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14613/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05198/) (2016)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [UnFlow: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow with a Bidirectional Census Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07837/) (2017)
- [FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09513/) (2019)
- [Tracking Emerges by Colorizing Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09594/) (2018)
- [Learning Video Object Segmentation from Static Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02646/) (2016)
- [Chained-Tracker: Chaining Paired Attentive Regression Results for End-to-End Joint Multiple-Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14557/) (2020)
- [Kernelized Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08270/) (2020)
- [Online Adaptation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09364/) (2017)
- [Learning Dense Correspondence via 3D-guided Cycle Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05383/) (2016)
- [Recycle-GAN: Unsupervised Video Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05174/) (2018)
- [RVOS: End-to-End Recurrent Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05612/) (2019)
- [PReMVOS: Proposal-generation, Refinement and Merging for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09190/) (2018)
- [Learning Fast and Robust Target Models for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00908/) (2020)
- [A Generative Appearance Model for End-to-end Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11611/) (2018)
- [Fast Video Object Segmentation using the Global Context Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11243/) (2020)
- [A Transductive Approach for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07193/) (2020)
- [DMM-Net: Differentiable Mask-Matching Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12471/) (2019)
- [Delving into the Cyclic Mechanism in Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12176/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern video object segmentation (VOS) algorithms have achieved remarkably high performance in a sequential processing order, while most of currently prevailing pipelines still show some obvious inadequacy like accumulative error, unknown robustness or lack of proper interpretation tools. In this paper, we place the semi-supervised video object segmentation problem into a cyclic workflow and find the defects above can be collectively addressed via the inherent cyclic property of semi-supervised VOS systems. Firstly, a cyclic mechanism incorporated to the standard sequential flow can produce more consistent representations for pixel-wise correspondance. Relying on the accurate reference mask in the starting frame, we show that the error propagation problem can be mitigated. Next, a simple gradient correction module, which naturally extends the offline cyclic pipeline to an online manner, can highlight the high-frequent and detailed part of results to further improve the segmentation quality while keeping feasible computation cost. Meanwhile such correction can protect the network from severe performance degration resulted from interference signals. Finally we develop cycle effective receptive field (cycle-ERF) based on gradient correction process to provide a new perspective into analyzing object-specific regions of interests. We conduct comprehensive comparison and detailed analysis on challenging benchmarks of DAVIS16, DAVIS17 and Youtube-VOS, demonstrating that the cyclic mechanism is helpful to enhance segmentation quality, improve the robustness of VOS systems, and further provide qualitative comparison and interpretation on how different VOS algorithms work. The code of this project can be found at https://github.com/lyxok1/STM-Training