Abstract Video instance segmentation is one of the core problems in computer vision. Formulating a purely learning-based method, which models the generic track management required to solve the video instance segmentation task, is a highly challenging problem. In this work, we propose a novel learning framework where the entire video instance segmentation problem is modeled jointly. To this end, we design a graph neural network that in each frame jointly processes all detections and a memory of previously seen tracks. Past information is considered and processed via a recurrent connection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comprehensive experiments. Our approach operates online at over 25 FPS and obtains 16.3 AP on the challenging OVIS benchmark, setting a new state-of-the-art. We further conduct detailed ablative experiments that validate the different aspects of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/emibr948/RGNNVIS-PlusPlus .

One of the fundamental challenges in video object segmentation is to find an effective representation of the target and background appearance. The best performing approaches resort to extensive fine-tuning of a convolutional neural network for this purpose. Besides being prohibitively expensive, this strategy cannot be truly trained end-to-end since the online fine-tuning procedure is not integrated into the offline training of the network. To address these issues, we propose a network architecture that learns a powerful representation of the target and background appearance in a single forward pass. The introduced appearance module learns a probabilistic generative model of target and background feature distributions. Given a new image, it predicts the posterior class probabilities, providing a highly discriminative cue, which is processed in later network modules. Both the learning and prediction stages of our appearance module are fully differentiable, enabling true end-to-end training of the entire segmentation pipeline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on three video object segmentation benchmarks. We close the gap to approaches based on online fine-tuning on DAVIS17, while operating at 15 FPS on a single GPU. Furthermore, our method outperforms all published approaches on the large-scale YouTube-VOS dataset.