# Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: Dataset and ICCV 2021 Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.07950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00831/) (2016)
- [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)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [Conditional Convolutions for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05664/) (2020)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [MOTS: Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03604/) (2019)
- [FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09513/) (2019)
- [Instances as Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01928/) (2021)
- [Track to Detect and Segment: An Online Multi-Object Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08808/) (2021)
- [Video Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11339/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Deep Occlusion-Aware Instance Segmentation with Overlapping BiLayers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12340/) (2021)
- [The 2019 DAVIS Challenge on VOS: Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00737/) (2019)
- [Crossover Learning for Fast Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05970/) (2021)
- [Adaptive NMS: Refining Pedestrian Detection in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03629/) (2019)
- [Repulsion Loss: Detecting Pedestrians in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07752/) (2017)
- [Detection in Crowded Scenes: One Proposal, Multiple Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09163/) (2020)
- [Occlusion-aware R-CNN: Detecting Pedestrians in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08407/) (2018)
- [The 2018 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00557/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [VISA: Reasoning Video Object Segmentation via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11325/) (2024)
- [VITA: Video Instance Segmentation via Object Token Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04403/) (2022)
- [A Generalized Framework for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08834/) (2022)
- [XMem++: Production-level Video Segmentation From Few Annotated Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15958/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Visual Prompt Learning for Continual Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08612/) (2025)
- [SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20140/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although deep learning methods have achieved advanced video object recognition performance in recent years, perceiving heavily occluded objects in a video is still a very challenging task. To promote the development of occlusion understanding, we collect a large-scale dataset called OVIS for video instance segmentation in the occluded scenario. OVIS consists of 296k high-quality instance masks and 901 occluded scenes. While our human vision systems can perceive those occluded objects by contextual reasoning and association, our experiments suggest that current video understanding systems cannot. On the OVIS dataset, all baseline methods encounter a significant performance degradation of about 80% in the heavily occluded object group, which demonstrates that there is still a long way to go in understanding obscured objects and videos in a complex real-world scenario. To facilitate the research on new paradigms for video understanding systems, we launched a challenge based on the OVIS dataset. The submitted top-performing algorithms have achieved much higher performance than our baselines. In this paper, we will introduce the OVIS dataset and further dissect it by analyzing the results of baselines and submitted methods. The OVIS dataset and challenge information can be found at http://songbai.site/ovis .