SeqFormer: Sequential Transformer for Video Instance Segmentation

In this work, we present SeqFormer for video instance segmentation. SeqFormer follows the principle of vision transformer that models instance relationships among video frames. Nevertheless, we observe that a stand-alone instance query suffices for capturing a time sequence of instances in a video, but attention mechanisms shall be done with each frame independently. To achieve this, SeqFormer locates an instance in each frame and aggregates temporal information to learn a powerful representation of a video-level instance, which is used to predict the mask sequences on each frame dynamically. Instance tracking is achieved naturally without tracking branches or post-processing. On YouTube-VIS, SeqFormer achieves 47.4 AP with a ResNet-50 backbone and 49.0 AP with a ResNet-101 backbone without bells and whistles. Such achievement significantly exceeds the previous state-of-the-art performance by 4.6 and 4.4, respectively. In addition, integrated with the recently-proposed Swin transformer, SeqFormer achieves a much higher AP of 59.3. We hope SeqFormer could be a strong baseline that fosters future research in video instance segmentation, and in the meantime, advances this field with a more robust, accurate, neat model. The code is available at https://github.com/wjf5203/SeqFormer.