# BoxMask: Revisiting Bounding Box Supervision for Video Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06008 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06008/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [Deep Feature Flow for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07715/) (2016)
- [Flow-Guided Feature Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10025/) (2017)
- [Acquisition of Localization Confidence for Accurate Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11590/) (2018)
- [BoxInst: High-Performance Instance Segmentation with Box Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02310/) (2020)
- [Detect to Track and Track to Detect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03958/) (2017)
- [Memory Enhanced Global-Local Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12063/) (2020)

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

- [Object Detection with Transformers: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04670/) (2023)
- [Objects do not disappear: Video object detection by single-frame object location anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04770/) (2023)
- [Erasure-based Interaction Network for RGBT Video Object Detection and A Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01630/) (2023)
- [Object Detection Difficulty: Suppressing Over-aggregation for Faster and Better Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11327/) (2023)
- [Beyond Boxes: Mask-Guided Spatio-Temporal Feature Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04915/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Learning through Auxiliary Branch for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20551/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a new, simple yet effective approach to uplift video object detection. We observe that prior works operate on instance-level feature aggregation that imminently neglects the refined pixel-level representation, resulting in confusion among objects sharing similar appearance or motion characteristics. To address this limitation, we propose BoxMask, which effectively learns discriminative representations by incorporating class-aware pixel-level information. We simply consider bounding box-level annotations as a coarse mask for each object to supervise our method. The proposed module can be effortlessly integrated into any region-based detector to boost detection. Extensive experiments on ImageNet VID and EPIC KITCHENS datasets demonstrate consistent and significant improvement when we plug our BoxMask module into numerous recent state-of-the-art methods.
