# Eigencontours: Novel Contour Descriptors Based on Low-Rank Approximation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15259 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15259/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [PolarMask: Single Shot Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13226/) (2019)
- [Bottom-up Object Detection by Grouping Extreme and Center Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08043/) (2019)
- [Deep Snake for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01629/) (2020)
- [Joint Semantic Segmentation and Boundary Detection using Iterative Pyramid Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07684/) (2020)
- [Mask Encoding for Single Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11712/) (2020)
- [Explicit Shape Encoding for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04067/) (2019)
- [DCT-Mask: Discrete Cosine Transform Mask Representation for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09876/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Oriented Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02755/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [EigenTrajectory: Low-Rank Descriptors for Multi-Modal Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09306/) (2023)
- [Recurrent Generic Contour-based Instance Segmentation with Progressive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08898/) (2023)
- [LRANet: Towards Accurate and Efficient Scene Text Detection with Low-Rank Approximation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15142/) (2023)
- [DeDA: Deep Directed Accumulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08434/) (2023)
- [SLoRD: Structural Low-Rank Descriptors for Shape Consistency in Vertebrae Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08555/) (2024)
- [PriorFusion: Unified Integration of Priors for Robust Road Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23309/) (2025)
- [ContourFormer: Real-Time Contour-Based End-to-End Instance Segmentation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17688/) (2025)
- [Applying Eigencontours to PolarMask-Based Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11258/) (2022)
- [DAGrid: Directed Accumulator Grid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02589/) (2023)
- [An Efficient Approach for Muscle Segmentation and 3D Reconstruction Using Keypoint Tracking in MRI Scan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08690/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Novel contour descriptors, called eigencontours, based on low-rank approximation are proposed in this paper. First, we construct a contour matrix containing all object boundaries in a training set. Second, we decompose the contour matrix into eigencontours via the best rank-M approximation. Third, we represent an object boundary by a linear combination of the M eigencontours. We also incorporate the eigencontours into an instance segmentation framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed eigencontours can represent object boundaries more effectively and more efficiently than existing descriptors in a low-dimensional space. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm yields meaningful performances on instance segmentation datasets.