Most existing remote sensing instance segmentation approaches are designed for close-vocabulary prediction, limiting their ability to recognize novel categories or generalize across datasets. This restricts their applicability in diverse Earth observation scenarios. To address this, we introduce open-vocabulary (OV) learning for remote sensing instance segmentation. While current OV segmentation models perform well on natural image datasets, their direct application to remote sensing faces challenges such as diverse landscapes, seasonal variations, and the presence of small or ambiguous objects in aerial imagery. To overcome these challenges, we propose $\textbf{SCORE}$ ($\textbf{S}$cene $\textbf{C}$ontext matters in $\textbf{O}$pen-vocabulary $\textbf{RE}$mote sensing instance segmentation), a framework that integrates multi-granularity scene context, i.e., regional context and global context, to enhance both visual and textual representations. Specifically, we introduce Region-Aware Integration, which refines class embeddings with regional context to improve object distinguishability. Additionally, we propose Global Context Adaptation, which enriches naive text embeddings with remote sensing global context, creating a more adaptable and expressive linguistic latent space for the classifier. We establish new benchmarks for OV remote sensing instance segmentation across diverse datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that, our proposed method achieves SOTA performance, which provides a robust solution for large-scale, real-world geospatial analysis. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuangShiqi128/SCORE.
Observer bias and inconsistencies in traditional plant phenotyping methods limit the accuracy and reproducibility of fine-grained plant analysis. To overcome these challenges, we developed TomatoMAP, a comprehensive dataset for Solanum lycopersicum using an Internet of Things (IoT) based imaging system with standardized data acquisition protocols. Our dataset contains 64,464 RGB images that capture 12 different plant poses from four camera elevation angles. Each image includes manually annotated bounding boxes for seven regions of interest (ROIs), including leaves, panicle, batch of flowers, batch of fruits, axillary shoot, shoot and whole plant area, along with 50 fine-grained growth stage classifications based on the BBCH scale. Additionally, we provide 3,616 high-resolution image subset with pixel-wise semantic and instance segmentation annotations for fine-grained phenotyping. We validated our dataset using a cascading model deep learning framework combining MobileNetv3 for classification, YOLOv11 for object detection, and MaskRCNN for segmentation. Through AI vs. Human analysis involving five domain experts, we demonstrate that the models trained on our dataset achieve accuracy and speed comparable to the experts. Cohen's Kappa and inter-rater agreement heatmap confirm the reliability of automated fine-grained phenotyping using our approach.
Partial-view 3D recognition -- reconstructing 3D geometry and identifying object instances from a few sparse RGB images -- is an exceptionally challenging yet practically essential task, particularly in cluttered, occluded real-world settings where full-view or reliable depth data are often unavailable. Existing methods, whether based on strong symmetry priors or supervised learning on curated datasets, fail to generalize to such scenarios. In this work, we introduce DreamGrasp, a framework that leverages the imagination capability of large-scale pre-trained image generative models to infer the unobserved parts of a scene. By combining coarse 3D reconstruction, instance segmentation via contrastive learning, and text-guided instance-wise refinement, DreamGrasp circumvents limitations of prior methods and enables robust 3D reconstruction in complex, multi-object environments. Our experiments show that DreamGrasp not only recovers accurate object geometry but also supports downstream tasks like sequential decluttering and target retrieval with high success rates.
Panoptic Scene Graph Generation (PSG) integrates instance segmentation with relation understanding to capture pixel-level structural relationships in complex scenes. Although recent approaches leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly improved performance in the open-vocabulary setting, they commonly ignore the inherent limitations of VLMs in spatial relation reasoning, such as difficulty in distinguishing object relative positions, which results in suboptimal relation prediction. Motivated by the denoising diffusion model's inversion process in preserving the spatial structure of input images, we propose SPADE (SPatial-Aware Denoising-nEtwork) framework -- a novel approach for open-vocabulary PSG. SPADE consists of two key steps: (1) inversion-guided calibration for the UNet adaptation, and (2) spatial-aware context reasoning. In the first step, we calibrate a general pre-trained teacher diffusion model into a PSG-specific denoising network with cross-attention maps derived during inversion through a lightweight LoRA-based fine-tuning strategy. In the second step, we develop a spatial-aware relation graph transformer that captures both local and long-range contextual information, facilitating the generation of high-quality relation queries. Extensive experiments on benchmark PSG and Visual Genome datasets demonstrate that SPADE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both closed- and open-set scenarios, particularly for spatial relationship prediction.
Instance segmentation of novel objects instances in RGB images, given some example images for each object, is a well known problem in computer vision. Designing a model general enough to be employed, for all kinds of novel objects, without (re-) training, has proven to be a difficult task. To handle this, we propose a simple, yet powerful, framework, called: Novel Object Cyclic Threshold based Instance Segmentation (NOCTIS). This work stems from and improves upon previous ones like CNOS, SAM-6D and NIDS-Net; thus, it also leverages on recent vision foundation models, namely: Grounded-SAM 2 and DINOv2. It utilises Grounded-SAM 2 to obtain object proposals with precise bounding boxes and their corresponding segmentation masks; while DINOv2's zero-shot capabilities are employed to generate the image embeddings. The quality of those masks, together with their embeddings, is of vital importance to our approach; as the proposal-object matching is realized by determining an object matching score based on the similarity of the class embeddings and the average maximum similarity of the patch embeddings. Differently to SAM-6D, calculating the latter involves a prior patch filtering based on the distance between each patch and its corresponding cyclic/roundtrip patch in the image grid. Furthermore, the average confidence of the proposals' bounding box and mask is used as an additional weighting factor for the object matching score. We empirically show that NOCTIS, without further training/fine tuning, outperforms the best RGB and RGB-D methods on the seven core datasets of the BOP 2023 challenge for the "Model-based 2D segmentation of unseen objects" task.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become horsepower in high-quality, real-time rendering for novel view synthesis of 3D scenes. However, existing methods focus primarily on geometric and appearance modeling, lacking deeper scene understanding while also incurring high training costs that complicate the originally streamlined differentiable rendering pipeline. To this end, we propose VoteSplat, a novel 3D scene understanding framework that integrates Hough voting with 3DGS. Specifically, Segment Anything Model (SAM) is utilized for instance segmentation, extracting objects, and generating 2D vote maps. We then embed spatial offset vectors into Gaussian primitives. These offsets construct 3D spatial votes by associating them with 2D image votes, while depth distortion constraints refine localization along the depth axis. For open-vocabulary object localization, VoteSplat maps 2D image semantics to 3D point clouds via voting points, reducing training costs associated with high-dimensional CLIP features while preserving semantic unambiguity. Extensive experiments demonstrate effectiveness of VoteSplat in open-vocabulary 3D instance localization, 3D point cloud understanding, click-based 3D object localization, hierarchical segmentation, and ablation studies. Our code is available at https://sy-ja.github.io/votesplat/
Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) fundamentally struggles with pervasive challenges including object occlusions, motion blur, and appearance variations during temporal association. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces geometric awareness to enhance VIS robustness by strategically leveraging monocular depth estimation. We systematically investigate three distinct integration paradigms. Expanding Depth Channel (EDC) method concatenates the depth map as input channel to segmentation networks; Sharing ViT (SV) designs a uniform ViT backbone, shared between depth estimation and segmentation branches; Depth Supervision (DS) makes use of depth prediction as an auxiliary training guide for feature learning. Though DS exhibits limited effectiveness, benchmark evaluations demonstrate that EDC and SV significantly enhance the robustness of VIS. When with Swin-L backbone, our EDC method gets 56.2 AP, which sets a new state-of-the-art result on OVIS benchmark. This work conclusively establishes depth cues as critical enablers for robust video understanding.
The open vocabulary capability of 3D models is increasingly valued, as traditional methods with models trained with fixed categories fail to recognize unseen objects in complex dynamic 3D scenes. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, SAS, to integrate the open vocabulary capability of multiple 2D models and migrate it to 3D domain. Specifically, we first propose Model Alignment via Text to map different 2D models into the same embedding space using text as a bridge. Then, we propose Annotation-Free Model Capability Construction to explicitly quantify the 2D model's capability of recognizing different categories using diffusion models. Following this, point cloud features from different 2D models are fused with the guide of constructed model capabilities. Finally, the integrated 2D open vocabulary capability is transferred to 3D domain through feature distillation. SAS outperforms previous methods by a large margin across multiple datasets, including ScanNet v2, Matterport3D, and nuScenes, while its generalizability is further validated on downstream tasks, e.g., gaussian segmentation and instance segmentation.
The performance of image segmentation models has historically been constrained by the high cost of collecting large-scale annotated data. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) alleviates this original problem through a promptable, semantics-agnostic, segmentation paradigm and yet still requires manual visual-prompts or complex domain-dependent prompt-generation rules to process a new image. Towards reducing this new burden, our work investigates the task of object segmentation when provided with, alternatively, only a small set of reference images. Our key insight is to leverage strong semantic priors, as learned by foundation models, to identify corresponding regions between a reference and a target image. We find that correspondences enable automatic generation of instance-level segmentation masks for downstream tasks and instantiate our ideas via a multi-stage, training-free method incorporating (1) memory bank construction; (2) representation aggregation and (3) semantic-aware feature matching. Our experiments show significant improvements on segmentation metrics, leading to state-of-the-art performance on COCO FSOD (36.8% nAP), PASCAL VOC Few-Shot (71.2% nAP50) and outperforming existing training-free approaches on the Cross-Domain FSOD benchmark (22.4% nAP).
Video Scene Parsing (VSP) has emerged as a cornerstone in computer vision, facilitating the simultaneous segmentation, recognition, and tracking of diverse visual entities in dynamic scenes. In this survey, we present a holistic review of recent advances in VSP, covering a wide array of vision tasks, including Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS), Video Instance Segmentation (VIS), Video Panoptic Segmentation (VPS), as well as Video Tracking and Segmentation (VTS), and Open-Vocabulary Video Segmentation (OVVS). We systematically analyze the evolution from traditional hand-crafted features to modern deep learning paradigms -- spanning from fully convolutional networks to the latest transformer-based architectures -- and assess their effectiveness in capturing both local and global temporal contexts. Furthermore, our review critically discusses the technical challenges, ranging from maintaining temporal consistency to handling complex scene dynamics, and offers a comprehensive comparative study of datasets and evaluation metrics that have shaped current benchmarking standards. By distilling the key contributions and shortcomings of state-of-the-art methodologies, this survey highlights emerging trends and prospective research directions that promise to further elevate the robustness and adaptability of VSP in real-world applications.
Instance segmentation of prohibited items in security X-ray images is a critical yet challenging task. This is mainly caused by the significant appearance gap between prohibited items in X-ray images and natural objects, as well as the severe overlapping among objects in X-ray images. To address these issues, we propose an occlusion-aware instance segmentation pipeline designed to identify prohibited items in X-ray images. Specifically, to bridge the representation gap, we integrate the Segment Anything Model (SAM) into our pipeline, taking advantage of its rich priors and zero-shot generalization capabilities. To address the overlap between prohibited items, we design an occlusion-aware bilayer mask decoder module that explicitly models the occlusion relationships. To supervise occlusion estimation, we manually annotated occlusion areas of prohibited items in two large-scale X-ray image segmentation datasets, PIDray and PIXray. We then reorganized these additional annotations together with the original information as two occlusion-annotated datasets, PIDray-A and PIXray-A. Extensive experimental results on these occlusion-annotated datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The datasets and codes are available at: https://github.com/Ryh1218/Occ
360 video captures the complete surrounding scenes with the ultra-large field of view of 360X180. This makes 360 scene understanding tasks, eg, segmentation and tracking, crucial for appications, such as autonomous driving, robotics. With the recent emergence of foundation models, the community is, however, impeded by the lack of large-scale, labelled real-world datasets. This is caused by the inherent spherical properties, eg, severe distortion in polar regions, and content discontinuities, rendering the annotation costly yet complex. This paper introduces Leader360V, the first large-scale, labeled real-world 360 video datasets for instance segmentation and tracking. Our datasets enjoy high scene diversity, ranging from indoor and urban settings to natural and dynamic outdoor scenes. To automate annotation, we design an automatic labeling pipeline, which subtly coordinates pre-trained 2D segmentors and large language models to facilitate the labeling. The pipeline operates in three novel stages. Specifically, in the Initial Annotation Phase, we introduce a Semantic- and Distortion-aware Refinement module, which combines object mask proposals from multiple 2D segmentors with LLM-verified semantic labels. These are then converted into mask prompts to guide SAM2 in generating distortion-aware masks for subsequent frames. In the Auto-Refine Annotation Phase, missing or incomplete regions are corrected either by applying the SDR again or resolving the discontinuities near the horizontal borders. The Manual Revision Phase finally incorporates LLMs and human annotators to further refine and validate the annotations. Extensive user studies and evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our labeling pipeline. Meanwhile, experiments confirm that Leader360V significantly enhances model performance for 360 video segmentation and tracking, paving the way for more scalable 360 scene understanding.
This paper addresses the problem of category-level pose estimation for articulated objects in robotic manipulation tasks. Recent works have shown promising results in estimating part pose and size at the category level. However, these approaches primarily follow a complex multi-stage pipeline that first segments part instances in the point cloud and then estimates the Normalized Part Coordinate Space (NPCS) representation for 6D poses. These approaches suffer from high computational costs and low performance in real-time robotic tasks. To address these limitations, we propose YOEO, a single-stage method that simultaneously outputs instance segmentation and NPCS representations in an end-to-end manner. We use a unified network to generate point-wise semantic labels and centroid offsets, allowing points from the same part instance to vote for the same centroid. We further utilize a clustering algorithm to distinguish points based on their estimated centroid distances. Finally, we first separate the NPCS region of each instance. Then, we align the separated regions with the real point cloud to recover the final pose and size. Experimental results on the GAPart dataset demonstrate the pose estimation capabilities of our proposed single-shot method. We also deploy our synthetically-trained model in a real-world setting, providing real-time visual feedback at 200Hz, enabling a physical Kinova robot to interact with unseen articulated objects. This showcases the utility and effectiveness of our proposed method.
Estimating the 6D pose of objects from RGBD data is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with applications in robotics and augmented reality. A key challenge is achieving generalization to novel objects that were not seen during training. Most existing approaches address this by scaling up training on synthetic data tailored to the task, a process that demands substantial computational resources. But is task-specific training really necessary for accurate and efficient 6D pose estimation of novel objects? To answer No!, we introduce FreeZeV2, the second generation of FreeZe: a training-free method that achieves strong generalization to unseen objects by leveraging geometric and vision foundation models pre-trained on unrelated data. FreeZeV2 improves both accuracy and efficiency over FreeZe through three key contributions: (i) a sparse feature extraction strategy that reduces inference-time computation without sacrificing accuracy; (ii) a feature-aware scoring mechanism that improves both pose selection during RANSAC-based 3D registration and the final ranking of pose candidates; and (iii) a modular design that supports ensembles of instance segmentation models, increasing robustness to segmentation masks errors. We evaluate FreeZeV2 on the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark, where it establishes a new state-of-the-art in 6D pose estimation of unseen objects. When using the same segmentation masks, FreeZeV2 achieves a remarkable 8x speedup over FreeZe while also improving accuracy by 5%. When using ensembles of segmentation models, FreeZeV2 gains an additional 8% in accuracy while still running 2.5x faster than FreeZe. FreeZeV2 was awarded Best Overall Method at the BOP Challenge 2024.
Cell instance segmentation is critical to analyzing biomedical images, yet accurately distinguishing tightly touching cells remains a persistent challenge. Existing instance segmentation frameworks, including detection-based, contour-based, and distance mapping-based approaches, have made significant progress, but balancing model performance with computational efficiency remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel cell instance segmentation method inspired by the four-color theorem. By conceptualizing cells as countries and tissues as oceans, we introduce a four-color encoding scheme that ensures adjacent instances receive distinct labels. This reformulation transforms instance segmentation into a constrained semantic segmentation problem with only four predicted classes, substantially simplifying the instance differentiation process. To solve the training instability caused by the non-uniqueness of four-color encoding, we design an asymptotic training strategy and encoding transformation method. Extensive experiments on various modes demonstrate our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zhangye-zoe/FCIS.
This paper introduces ALBERT, an instance segmentation model specifically designed for comprehensive car damage and part segmentation. Leveraging the power of Bidirectional Encoder Representations, ALBERT incorporates advanced localization mechanisms to accurately identify and differentiate between real and fake damages, as well as segment individual car parts. The model is trained on a large-scale, richly annotated automotive dataset that categorizes damage into 26 types, identifies 7 fake damage variants, and segments 61 distinct car parts. Our approach demonstrates strong performance in both segmentation accuracy and damage classification, paving the way for intelligent automotive inspection and assessment applications.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lag behind Large Language Models due to the scarcity of annotated datasets, as creating paired visual-textual annotations is labor-intensive and expensive. To address this bottleneck, we introduce SAM2Auto, the first fully automated annotation pipeline for video datasets requiring no human intervention or dataset-specific training. Our approach consists of two key components: SMART-OD, a robust object detection system that combines automatic mask generation with open-world object detection capabilities, and FLASH (Frame-Level Annotation and Segmentation Handler), a multi-object real-time video instance segmentation (VIS) that maintains consistent object identification across video frames even with intermittent detection gaps. Unlike existing open-world detection methods that require frame-specific hyperparameter tuning and suffer from numerous false positives, our system employs statistical approaches to minimize detection errors while ensuring consistent object tracking throughout entire video sequences. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that SAM2Auto achieves comparable accuracy to manual annotation while dramatically reducing annotation time and eliminating labor costs. The system successfully handles diverse datasets without requiring retraining or extensive parameter adjustments, making it a practical solution for large-scale dataset creation. Our work establishes a new baseline for automated video annotation and provides a pathway for accelerating VLM development by addressing the fundamental dataset bottleneck that has constrained progress in vision-language understanding.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for neural scene reconstruction, offering high-quality novel view synthesis while maintaining computational efficiency. In this paper, we extend the capabilities of 3DGS beyond pure scene representation by introducing an approach for open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation without requiring manual labeling, termed OpenSplat3D. Our method leverages feature-splatting techniques to associate semantic information with individual Gaussians, enabling fine-grained scene understanding. We incorporate Segment Anything Model instance masks with a contrastive loss formulation as guidance for the instance features to achieve accurate instance-level segmentation. Furthermore, we utilize language embeddings of a vision-language model, allowing for flexible, text-driven instance identification. This combination enables our system to identify and segment arbitrary objects in 3D scenes based on natural language descriptions. We show results on LERF-mask and LERF-OVS as well as the full ScanNet++ validation set, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Information on trees at the individual level is crucial for monitoring forest ecosystems and planning forest management. Current monitoring methods involve ground measurements, requiring extensive cost, time and labor. Advances in drone remote sensing and computer vision offer great potential for mapping individual trees from aerial imagery at broad-scale. Large pre-trained vision models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), represent a particularly compelling choice given limited labeled data. In this work, we compare methods leveraging SAM for the task of automatic tree crown instance segmentation in high resolution drone imagery in three use cases: 1) boreal plantations, 2) temperate forests and 3) tropical forests. We also study the integration of elevation data into models, in the form of Digital Surface Model (DSM) information, which can readily be obtained at no additional cost from RGB drone imagery. We present BalSAM, a model leveraging SAM and DSM information, which shows potential over other methods, particularly in the context of plantations. We find that methods using SAM out-of-the-box do not outperform a custom Mask R-CNN, even with well-designed prompts. However, efficiently tuning SAM end-to-end and integrating DSM information are both promising avenues for tree crown instance segmentation models.
We introduce CzechLynx, the first large-scale, open-access dataset for individual identification, 2D pose estimation, and instance segmentation of the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx). CzechLynx includes more than 30k camera trap images annotated with segmentation masks, identity labels, and 20-point skeletons and covers 219 unique individuals across 15 years of systematic monitoring in two geographically distinct regions: Southwest Bohemia and the Western Carpathians. To increase the data variability, we create a complementary synthetic set with more than 100k photorealistic images generated via a Unity-based pipeline and diffusion-driven text-to-texture modeling, covering diverse environments, poses, and coat-pattern variations. To allow testing generalization across spatial and temporal domains, we define three tailored evaluation protocols/splits: (i) geo-aware, (ii) time-aware open-set, and (iii) time-aware closed-set. This dataset is targeted to be instrumental in benchmarking state-of-the-art models and the development of novel methods for not just individual animal re-identification.