Sparse Instance Activation for Real-Time Instance Segmentation
This addresses the need for efficient instance segmentation in applications like autonomous driving, though it is incremental in improving speed and accuracy over existing methods.
The paper tackles real-time instance segmentation by introducing a sparse set of instance activation maps as a new object representation, which avoids non-maximum suppression and achieves 40 FPS and 37.9 AP on COCO.
In this paper, we propose a conceptually novel, efficient, and fully convolutional framework for real-time instance segmentation. Previously, most instance segmentation methods heavily rely on object detection and perform mask prediction based on bounding boxes or dense centers. In contrast, we propose a sparse set of instance activation maps, as a new object representation, to highlight informative regions for each foreground object. Then instance-level features are obtained by aggregating features according to the highlighted regions for recognition and segmentation. Moreover, based on bipartite matching, the instance activation maps can predict objects in a one-to-one style, thus avoiding non-maximum suppression (NMS) in post-processing. Owing to the simple yet effective designs with instance activation maps, SparseInst has extremely fast inference speed and achieves 40 FPS and 37.9 AP on the COCO benchmark, which significantly outperforms the counterparts in terms of speed and accuracy. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/SparseInst.