Region of Interest Align, or RoIAlign, is an operation for extracting a small feature map from each RoI in detection and segmentation based tasks. It removes the harsh quantization of RoI Pool, properly aligning the extracted features with the input. To avoid any quantization of the RoI boundaries or bins (using $x/16$ instead of $[x/16]$), RoIAlign uses bilinear interpolation to compute the exact values of the input features at four regularly sampled locations in each RoI bin, and the result is then aggregated (using max or average).
Mask R-CNN extends Faster R-CNN to solve instance segmentation tasks. It achieves this by adding a branch for predicting an object mask in parallel with the existing branch for bounding box recognition. In principle, Mask R-CNN is an intuitive extension of Faster R-CNN, but constructing the mask branch properly is critical for good results. Most importantly, Faster R-CNN was not designed for pixel-to-pixel alignment between network inputs and outputs. This is evident in how RoIPool, the de facto core operation for attending to instances, performs coarse spatial quantization for feature extraction. To fix the misalignment, Mask R-CNN utilises a simple, quantization-free layer, called RoIAlign, that faithfully preserves exact spatial locations. Secondly, Mask R-CNN decouples mask and class prediction: it predicts a binary mask for each class independently, without competition among classes, and relies on the network's RoI classification branch to predict the category. In contrast, an FCN usually perform per-pixel multi-class categorization, which couples segmentation and classification.