# Deep Level Set for Box-supervised Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03451/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 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)
- [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)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [Conditional Convolutions for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05664/) (2020)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [iSAID: A Large-scale Dataset for Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12886/) (2019)
- [PolarMask: Single Shot Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13226/) (2019)
- [BoxInst: High-Performance Instance Segmentation with Box Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02310/) (2020)
- [Deep Snake for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01629/) (2020)
- [BBAM: Bounding Box Attribution Map for Weakly Supervised Semantic and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08907/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping for Image Segmentation and Object Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00848/) (2015)
- [Foreground-Aware Relation Network for Geospatial Object Segmentation in High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09766/) (2020)
- [RefineMask: Towards High-Quality Instance Segmentation with Fine-Grained Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08569/) (2021)
- [Mumford-Shah Loss Functional for Image Segmentation with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02872/) (2019)
- [PointFlow: Flowing Semantics Through Points for Aerial Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06564/) (2021)
- [Weakly-supervised Instance Segmentation via Class-agnostic Learning with Salient Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01526/) (2021)
- [Reformulating Level Sets as Deep Recurrent Neural Network Approach to Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03593/) (2017)
- [Vehicle Instance Segmentation from Aerial Image and Video Using a Multi-Task Learning Residual Fully Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10485/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Box-supervised instance segmentation has recently attracted lots of research efforts while little attention is received in aerial image domain. In contrast to the general object collections, aerial objects have large intra-class variances and inter-class similarity with complex background. Moreover, there are many tiny objects in the high-resolution satellite images. This makes the recent pairwise affinity modeling method inevitably to involve the noisy supervision with the inferior results. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel aerial instance segmentation approach, which drives the network to learn a series of level set functions for the aerial objects with only box annotations in an end-to-end fashion. Instead of learning the pairwise affinity, the level set method with the carefully designed energy functions treats the object segmentation as curve evolution, which is able to accurately recover the object's boundaries and prevent the interference from the indistinguishable background and similar objects. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art box-supervised instance segmentation methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiWentomng/boxlevelset.