Video Object Segmentation by Learning Location-Sensitive Embeddings

Hai Ci, Chunyu Wang, Yizhou Wang; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 501-516

We address the problem of video object segmentation which outputs the masks of a target object throughout a video given only a bounding box in the first frame. There are two main challenges for this task. First, the background may contain similar objects as the target. Second, the appearance of the target object may change drastically over time. To tackle these challenges, we propose an end-to-end training network which accomplishes foreground predictions by leveraging the location-sensitive embeddings which are capable to distinguish the pixels of similar objects. To deal with appearance changes, for a test video, we propose a robust model adaptation method which pre-scans the whole video, generates pseudo foreground/background labels and retrains the model based on the labels. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the DAVIS and the SegTrack V2 datasets.