Wenwei Zhang Jiangmiao Pang Kai Chen Chen Change Loy

Abstract
Semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentations have been addressed using different and specialized frameworks despite their underlying connections. This paper presents a unified, simple, and effective framework for these essentially similar tasks. The framework, named K-Net, segments both instances and semantic categories consistently by a group of learnable kernels, where each kernel is responsible for generating a mask for either a potential instance or a stuff class. To remedy the difficulties of distinguishing various instances, we propose a kernel update strategy that enables each kernel dynamic and conditional on its meaningful group in the input image. K-Net can be trained in an end-to-end manner with bipartite matching, and its training and inference are naturally NMS-free and box-free. Without bells and whistles, K-Net surpasses all previous published state-of-the-art single-model results of panoptic segmentation on MS COCO test-dev split and semantic segmentation on ADE20K val split with 55.2% PQ and 54.3% mIoU, respectively. Its instance segmentation performance is also on par with Cascade Mask R-CNN on MS COCO with 60%-90% faster inference speeds. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/ZwwWayne/K-Net/.
Code Repositories
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Methodology | Metrics |
|---|---|---|
| instance-segmentation-on-coco | K-Net (ResNet-101) | AP50: 62.8 APL: 58.8 APM: 42.7 APS: 18.7 mask AP: 40.1% |
| instance-segmentation-on-coco | K-Net-N256 (ResNet-101) | AP50: 63.3 APL: 59 APM: 43.3 APS: 18.8 mask AP: 40.6% |
| panoptic-segmentation-on-coco-test-dev | K-Net (Swin-L) | PQ: 55.2 PQst: 46.2 PQth: 61.2 |
| panoptic-segmentation-on-coco-test-dev | K-Net (R101-FPN-DCN) | PQ: 48.3 PQst: 39.7 PQth: 54 |
| semantic-segmentation-on-ade20k | K-Net | Validation mIoU: 54.3 |
| semantic-segmentation-on-ade20k-val | K-Net | mIoU: 54.3 |
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