Growing Instance Mask on Leaf

Contour-based instance segmentation methods include one-stage and multi-stage schemes. These approaches achieve remarkable performance. However, they have to define plenty of points to segment precise masks, which leads to high complexity. We follow this issue and present a single-shot method, called VeinMask, for achieving competitive performance in low design complexity. Concretely, we observe that the leaf locates coarse margins via major veins and grows minor veins to refine twisty parts, which makes it possible to cover any objects accurately. Meanwhile, major and minor veins share the same growth mode, which avoids modeling them separately and ensures model simplicity. Considering the superiorities above, we propose VeinMask to formulate the instance segmentation problem as the simulation of the vein growth process and to predict the major and minor veins in polar coordinates. Besides, centroidness is introduced for instance segmentation tasks to help suppress low-quality instances. Furthermore, a surroundings cross-correlation sensitive (SCCS) module is designed to enhance the feature expression by utilizing the surroundings of each pixel. Additionally, a Residual IoU (R-IoU) loss is formulated to supervise the regression tasks of major and minor veins effectively. Experiments demonstrate that VeinMask performs much better than other contour-based methods in low design complexity. Particularly, our method outperforms existing one-stage contour-based methods on the COCO dataset with almost half the design complexity.