Generalized Mask-aware IoU for Anchor Assignment for Real-time Instance Segmentation

This paper introduces Generalized Mask-aware Intersection-over-Union (GmaIoU) as a new measure for positive-negative assignment of anchor boxes during training of instance segmentation methods. Unlike conventional IoU measure or its variants, which only consider the proximity of anchor and ground-truth boxes; GmaIoU additionally takes into account the segmentation mask. This enables GmaIoU to provide more accurate supervision during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GmaIoU by replacing IoU with our GmaIoU in ATSS, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) assigner. Then, we train YOLACT, a real-time instance segmentation method, using our GmaIoU-based ATSS assigner. The resulting YOLACT based on the GmaIoU assigner outperforms (i) ATSS with IoU by ~ 1.0-1.5 mask AP, (ii) YOLACT with a fixed IoU threshold assigner by ~ 1.5-2 mask AP over different image sizes and (iii) decreases the inference time by 25 % owing to using less anchors. Taking advantage of this efficiency, we further devise GmaYOLACT, a faster and +7 mask AP points more accurate detector than YOLACT. Our best model achieves 38.7 mask AP at 26 fps on COCO test-dev establishing a new state-of-the-art for real-time instance segmentation.