# A Novel Incremental Learning Driven Instance Segmentation Framework to Recognize Highly Cluttered Instances of the Contraband Items

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02560/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [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)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [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)
- [GANomaly: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06725/) (2018)
- [On the Efficacy of Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01348/) (2019)
- [Expert Gate: Lifelong Learning with a Network of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06194/) (2016)
- [Mask Scoring R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00241/) (2019)
- [Class-incremental Learning via Deep Model Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07864/) (2019)
- [Understanding Convolution for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08502/) (2017)
- [Incremental Learning Techniques for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13372/) (2019)
- [Skip-GANomaly: Skip Connected and Adversarially Trained Encoder-Decoder Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08954/) (2019)
- [SIXray : A Large-scale Security Inspection X-ray Benchmark for Prohibited Item Discovery in Overlapping Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00303/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Distillation for Incremental Learning in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03462/) (2019)
- [Towards Automatic Threat Detection: A Survey of Advances of Deep Learning within X-ray Security Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01293/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Integrating Features for Recognizing Human Activities through Optimized Parameters in Graph Convolutional Networks and Transformer Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16442/) (2024)
- [Beyond Discrete Samples: High Information Density Replay for Efficient Lifelong Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01587/) (2025)
- [GSA-YOLO: A High-Efficiency Framework via Structured Sparsity and Adaptive Knowledge Distillation for Real-Time X-ray Security Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20669/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Screening cluttered and occluded contraband items from baggage X-ray scans is a cumbersome task even for the expert security staff. This paper presents a novel strategy that extends a conventional encoder-decoder architecture to perform instance-aware segmentation and extract merged instances of contraband items without using any additional sub-network or an object detector. The encoder-decoder network first performs conventional semantic segmentation and retrieves cluttered baggage items. The model then incrementally evolves during training to recognize individual instances using significantly reduced training batches. To avoid catastrophic forgetting, a novel objective function minimizes the network loss in each iteration by retaining the previously acquired knowledge while learning new class representations and resolving their complex structural inter-dependencies through Bayesian inference. A thorough evaluation of our framework on two publicly available X-ray datasets shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially within the challenging cluttered scenarios, while achieving an optimal trade-off between detection accuracy and efficiency.