# Mask DINO: Towards A Unified Transformer-based Framework for Object Detection and Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02777 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02777/

## Key facts

- Cited by 344 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02446/) (2019)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09018/) (2021)
- [K-Net: Towards Unified Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14855/) (2021)
- [UPSNet: A Unified Panoptic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03784/) (2019)
- [Instances as Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01928/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 344)

- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06220/) (2022)
- [Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4V](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11441/) (2023)
- [Convolutions Die Hard: Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Single Frozen Convolutional CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02487/) (2023)
- [A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08131/) (2023)
- [MapTRv2: An End-to-End Framework for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05736/) (2023)
- [Semantic-SAM: Segment and Recognize Anything at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04767/) (2023)
- [Panoptic Lifting for 3D Scene Understanding with Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09802/) (2022)
- [DETRs with Hybrid Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13080/) (2022)
- [VisionLLM v2: An End-to-End Generalist Multimodal Large Language Model for Hundreds of Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08394/) (2024)
- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [Delving into the Devils of Bird's-eye-view Perception: A Review, Evaluation and Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05324/) (2022)
- [The All-Seeing Project: Towards Panoptic Visual Recognition and Understanding of the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01907/) (2023)
- [Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Patch Aligned Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04994/) (2022)
- [A Generalist Framework for Panoptic Segmentation of Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06366/) (2022)
- [Group DETR: Fast DETR Training with Group-Wise One-to-Many Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13085/) (2022)
- [OneFormer3D: One Transformer for Unified Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14405/) (2023)
- [Symphonize 3D Semantic Scene Completion with Contextual Instance Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15670/) (2023)
- [DINO-X: A Unified Vision Model for Open-World Object Detection and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14347/) (2024)
- [Stronger, Fewer, & Superior: Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04265/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary SAM: Segment and Recognize Twenty-thousand Classes Interactively](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02955/) (2024)
- [RF-DETR: Neural Architecture Search for Real-Time Detection Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09554/) (2025)
- [General Object Foundation Model for Images and Videos at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09158/) (2023)
- [Improving 2D Feature Representations by 3D-Aware Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20229/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper we present Mask DINO, a unified object detection and segmentation framework. Mask DINO extends DINO (DETR with Improved Denoising Anchor Boxes) by adding a mask prediction branch which supports all image segmentation tasks (instance, panoptic, and semantic). It makes use of the query embeddings from DINO to dot-product a high-resolution pixel embedding map to predict a set of binary masks. Some key components in DINO are extended for segmentation through a shared architecture and training process. Mask DINO is simple, efficient, and scalable, and it can benefit from joint large-scale detection and segmentation datasets. Our experiments show that Mask DINO significantly outperforms all existing specialized segmentation methods, both on a ResNet-50 backbone and a pre-trained model with SwinL backbone. Notably, Mask DINO establishes the best results to date on instance segmentation (54.5 AP on COCO), panoptic segmentation (59.4 PQ on COCO), and semantic segmentation (60.8 mIoU on ADE20K) among models under one billion parameters. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/IDEACVR/MaskDINO.