# PanSR: An Object-Centric Mask Transformer for Panoptic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10589 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10589/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [Panoptic-DeepLab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04751/) (2019)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06220/) (2022)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08131/) (2023)
- [UPSNet: A Unified Panoptic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03784/) (2019)
- [DAVE -- A Detect-and-Verify Paradigm for Low-Shot Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16622/) (2024)
- [LaRS: A Diverse Panoptic Maritime Obstacle Detection Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09618/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [3rd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2025: Challenge Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10343/) (2025)
- [4th Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi): Challenge Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13244/) (2026)
- [QCell: Recombining and Aligning Cell Queries for Overlapping Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29253/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Panoptic segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision and a crucial component for perception in autonomous vehicles. Recent mask-transformer-based methods achieve impressive performance on standard benchmarks but face significant challenges with small objects, crowded scenes and scenes exhibiting a wide range of object scales. We identify several fundamental shortcomings of the current approaches: (i) the query proposal generation process is biased towards larger objects, resulting in missed smaller objects, (ii) initially well-localized queries may drift to other objects, resulting in missed detections, (iii) spatially well-separated instances may be merged into a single mask causing inconsistent and false scene interpretations. To address these issues, we rethink the individual components of the network and its supervision, and propose a novel method for panoptic segmentation PanSR. PanSR effectively mitigates instance merging, enhances small-object detection and increases performance in crowded scenes, delivering a notable +3.4 PQ improvement over state-of-the-art on the challenging LaRS benchmark, while reaching state-of-the-art performance on Cityscapes. The code and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/lojzezust/PanSR.