Ruolin Ye

Tutian Tang, Wenqiang Xu, Ruolin Ye et al.

Direct contour regression for instance segmentation is a challenging task. Previous works usually achieve it by learning to progressively refine the contour prediction or adopting a shape representation with limited expressiveness. In this work, we argue that the difficulty in regressing the contour points in one pass is mainly due to the ambiguity when discretizing a smooth contour into a polygon. To address the ambiguity, we propose a novel differentiable rendering-based approach named \textbf{ContourRender}. During training, it first predicts a contour generated by an invertible shape signature, and then optimizes the contour with the more stable silhouette by converting it to a contour mesh and rendering the mesh to a 2D map. This method significantly improves the quality of contour without iterations or cascaded refinements. Moreover, as optimization is not needed during inference, the inference speed will not be influenced. Experiments show the proposed ContourRender outperforms all the contour-based instance segmentation approaches on COCO, while stays competitive with the iteration-based state-of-the-art on Cityscapes. In addition, we specifically select a subset from COCO val2017 named COCO ContourHard-val to further demonstrate the contour quality improvements. Codes, models, and dataset split will be released.

Tutian Tang, Wenqiang Xu, Ruolin Ye et al.

We present a novel explicit shape representation for instance segmentation. Based on how to model the object shape, current instance segmentation systems can be divided into two categories, implicit and explicit models. The implicit methods, which represent the object mask/contour by intractable network parameters, and produce it through pixel-wise classification, are predominant. However, the explicit methods, which parameterize the shape with simple and explainable models, are less explored. Since the operations to generate the final shape are light-weighted, the explicit methods have a clear speed advantage over implicit methods, which is crucial for real-world applications. The proposed USD-Seg adopts a linear model, sparse coding with dictionary, for object shapes. First, it learns a dictionary from a large collection of shape datasets, making any shape being able to be decomposed into a linear combination through the dictionary. Hence the name "Universal Shape Dictionary". Then it adds a simple shape vector regression head to ordinary object detector, giving the detector segmentation ability with minimal overhead. For quantitative evaluation, we use both average precision (AP) and the proposed Efficiency of AP (AP$_E$) metric, which intends to also measure the computational consumption of the framework to cater to the requirements of real-world applications. We report experimental results on the challenging COCO dataset, in which our single model on a single Titan Xp GPU achieves 35.8 AP and 27.8 AP$_E$ at 65 fps with YOLOv4 as base detector, 34.1 AP and 28.6 AP$_E$ at 12 fps with FCOS as base detector.