2019/09/29 by Enze Xie, Xie, Enze, Peize Sun +11 · 4 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning and Data Classification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.13226
openalex publication_date 2019/09/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we introduce an anchor-box free and single shot instance segmentation method, which is conceptually simple, fully convolutional and can be used as a mask prediction module for instance segmentation, by easily embedding it into most off-the-shelf detection methods. Our method, termed PolarMask, formulates the instance segmentation problem as instance center classification and dense distance regression in a polar coordinate. Moreover, we propose two effective approaches to deal with sampling high-quality center examples and optimization for dense distance regression, respectively, which can significantly improve the performance and simplify the training process. Without any bells and whistles, PolarMask achieves 32.9% in mask mAP with single-model and single-scale training/testing on challenging COCO dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and flexible instance segmentation framework achieving competitive accuracy. We hope that the proposed PolarMask framework can serve as a fundamental and strong baseline for single shot instance segmentation tasks. Code is available at: github.com/xieenze/PolarMask.