# VISAGE: Video Instance Segmentation with Appearance-Guided Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04885/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Video Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14503/) (2020)
- [Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04804/) (2019)
- [Mask2Former for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10764/) (2021)
- [Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01558/) (2021)
- [Video Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11339/) (2020)
- [STEm-Seg: Spatio-temporal Embeddings for Instance Segmentation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08429/) (2020)
- [Video Instance Segmentation using Inter-Frame Communication Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03299/) (2021)
- [In Defense of Online Models for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10661/) (2022)
- [VITA: Video Instance Segmentation via Object Token Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04403/) (2022)
- [MinVIS: A Minimal Video Instance Segmentation Framework without Video-based Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02245/) (2022)
- [Bridging Composite and Real: Towards End-to-end Deep Image Matting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16188/) (2020)
- [Crossover Learning for Fast Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05970/) (2021)
- [DVIS: Decoupled Video Instance Segmentation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03413/) (2023)
- [QDTrack: Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Appearance-Only Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06984/) (2022)
- [Temporally Efficient Vision Transformer for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08412/) (2022)
- [A Generalized Framework for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08834/) (2022)
- [CTVIS: Consistent Training for Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12616/) (2023)
- [Prototypical Cross-Attention Networks for Multiple Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11958/) (2021)
- [Efficient Video Instance Segmentation via Tracklet Query and Proposal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01853/) (2022)
- [VISOLO: Grid-Based Space-Time Aggregation for Efficient Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04177/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [CAVIS: Context-Aware Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03010/) (2024)
- [Latest Object Memory Management for Temporally Consistent Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19754/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Visual Prompt Learning for Continual Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08612/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Universal Video Segmentation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19242/) (2025)
- [SeaVIS: Sound-Enhanced Association for Online Audio-Visual Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01431/) (2026)
- [QueenVIS: Rethinking Image-Only Training for Video Instance Segmentation via Query Enrichment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24598/) (2026)
- [QCell: Recombining and Aligning Cell Queries for Overlapping Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29253/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, online Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) methods have shown remarkable advancement with their powerful query-based detectors. Utilizing the output queries of the detector at the frame-level, these methods achieve high accuracy on challenging benchmarks. However, our observations demonstrate that these methods heavily rely on location information, which often causes incorrect associations between objects. This paper presents that a key axis of object matching in trackers is appearance information, which becomes greatly instructive under conditions where positional cues are insufficient for distinguishing their identities. Therefore, we suggest a simple yet powerful extension to object decoders that explicitly extract embeddings from backbone features and drive queries to capture the appearances of objects, which greatly enhances instance association accuracy. Furthermore, recognizing the limitations of existing benchmarks in fully evaluating appearance awareness, we have constructed a synthetic dataset to rigorously validate our method. By effectively resolving the over-reliance on location information, we achieve state-of-the-art results on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021 and Occluded VIS (OVIS). Code is available at https://github.com/KimHanjung/VISAGE.