LVOS: A Benchmark for Large-scale Long-term Video Object Segmentation

Video object segmentation (VOS) aims to distinguish and track target objects in a video. Despite the excellent performance achieved by off-the-shell VOS models, existing VOS benchmarks mainly focus on short-term videos lasting about 5 seconds, where objects remain visible most of the time. However, these benchmarks poorly represent practical applications, and the absence of long-term datasets restricts further investigation of VOS in realistic scenarios. Thus, we propose a novel benchmark named LVOS, comprising 720 videos with 296,401 frames and 407,945 high-quality annotations. Videos in LVOS last 1.14 minutes on average, approximately 5 times longer than videos in existing datasets. Each video includes various attributes, especially challenges deriving from the wild, such as long-term reappearing and cross-temporal similar objects. Compared to previous benchmarks, our LVOS better reflects VOS models' performance in real scenarios. Based on LVOS, we evaluate 20 existing VOS models under 4 different settings and conduct a comprehensive analysis. On LVOS, these models suffer a large performance drop, highlighting the challenge of achieving precise tracking and segmentation in real-world scenarios. Attribute-based analysis indicates that key factor to accuracy decline is the increased video length, emphasizing LVOS's crucial role. We hope our LVOS can advance development of VOS in real scenes. Data and code are available at https://lingyihongfd.github.io/lvos.github.io/.

OneTracker: Unifying Visual Object Tracking with Foundation Models and Efficient Tuning

Visual object tracking aims to localize the target object of each frame based on its initial appearance in the first frame. Depending on the input modility, tracking tasks can be divided into RGB tracking and RGB+X (e.g. RGB+N, and RGB+D) tracking. Despite the different input modalities, the core aspect of tracking is the temporal matching. Based on this common ground, we present a general framework to unify various tracking tasks, termed as OneTracker. OneTracker first performs a large-scale pre-training on a RGB tracker called Foundation Tracker. This pretraining phase equips the Foundation Tracker with a stable ability to estimate the location of the target object. Then we regard other modality information as prompt and build Prompt Tracker upon Foundation Tracker. Through freezing the Foundation Tracker and only adjusting some additional trainable parameters, Prompt Tracker inhibits the strong localization ability from Foundation Tracker and achieves parameter-efficient finetuning on downstream RGB+X tracking tasks. To evaluate the effectiveness of our general framework OneTracker, which is consisted of Foundation Tracker and Prompt Tracker, we conduct extensive experiments on 6 popular tracking tasks across 11 benchmarks and our OneTracker outperforms other models and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

OneVOS: Unifying Video Object Segmentation with All-in-One Transformer Framework

Contemporary Video Object Segmentation (VOS) approaches typically consist stages of feature extraction, matching, memory management, and multiple objects aggregation. Recent advanced models either employ a discrete modeling for these components in a sequential manner, or optimize a combined pipeline through substructure aggregation. However, these existing explicit staged approaches prevent the VOS framework from being optimized as a unified whole, leading to the limited capacity and suboptimal performance in tackling complex videos. In this paper, we propose OneVOS, a novel framework that unifies the core components of VOS with All-in-One Transformer. Specifically, to unify all aforementioned modules into a vision transformer, we model all the features of frames, masks and memory for multiple objects as transformer tokens, and integrally accomplish feature extraction, matching and memory management of multiple objects through the flexible attention mechanism. Furthermore, a Unidirectional Hybrid Attention is proposed through a double decoupling of the original attention operation, to rectify semantic errors and ambiguities of stored tokens in OneVOS framework. Finally, to alleviate the storage burden and expedite inference, we propose the Dynamic Token Selector, which unveils the working mechanism of OneVOS and naturally leads to a more efficient version of OneVOS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of OneVOS, achieving state-of-the-art performance across 7 datasets, particularly excelling in complex LVOS and MOSE datasets with 70.1% and 66.4% $J \& F$ scores, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by 4.2% and 7.0%, respectively. And our code will be available for reproducibility and further research.

ClickVOS: Click Video Object Segmentation

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) task aims to segment objects in videos. However, previous settings either require time-consuming manual masks of target objects at the first frame during inference or lack the flexibility to specify arbitrary objects of interest. To address these limitations, we propose the setting named Click Video Object Segmentation (ClickVOS) which segments objects of interest across the whole video according to a single click per object in the first frame. And we provide the extended datasets DAVIS-P and YouTubeVOSP that with point annotations to support this task. ClickVOS is of significant practical applications and research implications due to its only 1-2 seconds interaction time for indicating an object, comparing annotating the mask of an object needs several minutes. However, ClickVOS also presents increased challenges. To address this task, we propose an end-to-end baseline approach named called Attention Before Segmentation (ABS), motivated by the attention process of humans. ABS utilizes the given point in the first frame to perceive the target object through a concise yet effective segmentation attention. Although the initial object mask is possibly inaccurate, in our ABS, as the video goes on, the initially imprecise object mask can self-heal instead of deteriorating due to error accumulation, which is attributed to our designed improvement memory that continuously records stable global object memory and updates detailed dense memory. In addition, we conduct various baseline explorations utilizing off-the-shelf algorithms from related fields, which could provide insights for the further exploration of ClickVOS. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ABS approach. Extended datasets and codes will be available at https://github.com/PinxueGuo/ClickVOS.

Reading Relevant Feature from Global Representation Memory for Visual Object Tracking

Reference features from a template or historical frames are crucial for visual object tracking. Prior works utilize all features from a fixed template or memory for visual object tracking. However, due to the dynamic nature of videos, the required reference historical information for different search regions at different time steps is also inconsistent. Therefore, using all features in the template and memory can lead to redundancy and impair tracking performance. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel tracking paradigm, consisting of a relevance attention mechanism and a global representation memory, which can adaptively assist the search region in selecting the most relevant historical information from reference features. Specifically, the proposed relevance attention mechanism in this work differs from previous approaches in that it can dynamically choose and build the optimal global representation memory for the current frame by accessing cross-frame information globally. Moreover, it can flexibly read the relevant historical information from the constructed memory to reduce redundancy and counteract the negative effects of harmful information. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving competitive performance on five challenging datasets with 71 FPS.

SimulFlow: Simultaneously Extracting Feature and Identifying Target for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation

Unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) aims at detecting the primary objects in a given video sequence without any human interposing. Most existing methods rely on two-stream architectures that separately encode the appearance and motion information before fusing them to identify the target and generate object masks. However, this pipeline is computationally expensive and can lead to suboptimal performance due to the difficulty of fusing the two modalities properly. In this paper, we propose a novel UVOS model called SimulFlow that simultaneously performs feature extraction and target identification, enabling efficient and effective unsupervised video object segmentation. Concretely, we design a novel SimulFlow Attention mechanism to bridege the image and motion by utilizing the flexibility of attention operation, where coarse masks predicted from fused feature at each stage are used to constrain the attention operation within the mask area and exclude the impact of noise. Because of the bidirectional information flow between visual and optical flow features in SimulFlow Attention, no extra hand-designed fusing module is required and we only adopt a light decoder to obtain the final prediction. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results. Our proposed approach not only outperforms existing methods but also addresses the computational complexity and fusion difficulties caused by two-stream architectures. Our models achieve 87.4% J & F on DAVIS-16 with the highest speed (63.7 FPS on a 3090) and the lowest parameters (13.7 M). Our SimulFlow also obtains competitive results on video salient object detection datasets.

PanoVOS: Bridging Non-panoramic and Panoramic Views with Transformer for Video Segmentation

Panoramic videos contain richer spatial information and have attracted tremendous amounts of attention due to their exceptional experience in some fields such as autonomous driving and virtual reality. However, existing datasets for video segmentation only focus on conventional planar images. To address the challenge, in this paper, we present a panoramic video dataset, PanoVOS. The dataset provides 150 videos with high video resolutions and diverse motions. To quantify the domain gap between 2D planar videos and panoramic videos, we evaluate 15 off-the-shelf video object segmentation (VOS) models on PanoVOS. Through error analysis, we found that all of them fail to tackle pixel-level content discontinues of panoramic videos. Thus, we present a Panoramic Space Consistency Transformer (PSCFormer), which can effectively utilize the semantic boundary information of the previous frame for pixel-level matching with the current frame. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with the previous SOTA models, our PSCFormer network exhibits a great advantage in terms of segmentation results under the panoramic setting. Our dataset poses new challenges in panoramic VOS and we hope that our PanoVOS can advance the development of panoramic segmentation/tracking.

Boosting the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks with Global Momentum Initialization

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which attach human invisible perturbations to benign inputs. Simultaneously, adversarial examples exhibit transferability under different models, which makes practical black-box attacks feasible. However, existing methods are still incapable of achieving desired transfer attack performance. In this work, from the perspective of gradient optimization and consistency, we analyze and discover the gradient elimination phenomenon as well as the local momentum optimum dilemma. To tackle these issues, we propose Global Momentum Initialization (GI) to suppress gradient elimination and help search for the global optimum. Specifically, we perform gradient pre-convergence before the attack and carry out a global search during the pre-convergence stage. Our method can be easily combined with almost all existing transfer methods, and we improve the success rate of transfer attacks significantly by an average of 6.4% under various advanced defense mechanisms compared to state-of-the-art methods. Eventually, we achieve an attack success rate of 95.4%, fully illustrating the insecurity of existing defense mechanisms.

LVOS: A Benchmark for Long-term Video Object Segmentation

Existing video object segmentation (VOS) benchmarks focus on short-term videos which just last about 3-5 seconds and where objects are visible most of the time. These videos are poorly representative of practical applications, and the absence of long-term datasets restricts further investigation of VOS on the application in realistic scenarios. So, in this paper, we present a new benchmark dataset and evaluation methodology named LVOS, which consists of 220 videos with a total duration of 421 minutes. To the best of our knowledge, LVOS is the first densely annotated long-term VOS dataset. The videos in our LVOS last 1.59 minutes on average, which is 20 times longer than videos in existing VOS datasets. Each video includes various attributes, especially challenges deriving from the wild, such as long-term reappearing and cross-temporal similar objeccts. Moreover, we provide additional language descriptions to encourage the exploration of integrating linguistic and visual features for video object segmentation. Based on LVOS, we assess existing video object segmentation algorithms and propose a Diverse Dynamic Memory network (DDMemory) that consists of three complementary memory banks to exploit temporal information adequately. The experiment results demonstrate the strength and weaknesses of prior methods, pointing promising directions for further study. Our objective is to provide the community with a large and varied benchmark to boost the advancement of long-term VOS. Data and code are available at \url{https://lingyihongfd.github.io/lvos.github.io/}.