Organizations: College of Artificial Intelligence National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University · Department of Computer Science National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
Autonomous industrial inspection requires strictly deterministic real-time inference under tight memory and computational constraints. However, existing Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) models suffer from prohibitive scaling: dense temporal memory grows with spatial resolution and sequence length, while fixed-capacity decoders fail to exploit the inherent sparsity of industrial scenes, creating a practical memory wall on resource-constrained edge platforms. We present DetM-Tracker, a streamlined VIS framework for autonomous industrial inspection, where target objects often exhibit highly similar appearance under constrained "micro" fields of view. DetM-Tracker eliminates architectural redundancy through three synergistic components: (1) Compact Scalar Memory, which condenses high-dimensional instance features into four-scalar descriptors, reducing temporal memory complexity from O(T⋅N⋅R) to O(T⋅N^). This mechanism effectively compresses frame-level representations into a bank of active instances, where R denotes resolution, N and N^ represent global and window-specific instance counts, respectively and T the temporal window size; and (2) Dynamic Instance Channels, which adaptively allocate query capacity according to the actual number of visible objects; and (3) Entropy-Gated Skip Connection, which concentrates computational budget on high-uncertainty spatial regions to refine object boundaries in a single forward pass without auxiliary refinement heads. Our approach effectively bridges the gap between modern VIS models and the practical demands of industrial edge deployment, reducing inference latency by approximately 20× and VRAM consumption by 6× compared to state-of-the-art dense-feature baselines.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the DetM-Tracker Architecture. The framework decouples VIS into persistent identity and dynamic temporal reasoning. Past states are distilled into Compact Scalar Memory s , which is processed by a memory encoder to produce resolution-invariant temporal tokens XM . These tokens provide context for Memory Attention to refine current-frame image features. The Mask Decoder then facilitates mutual refinement between image-conditioned features and Global Object Queries Pobj to generate initial masks. Finally, Entropy-Gated Skip Connection H( H(⋅) ) selectively integrates high-resolution cues to resolve boundary ambiguities in a single forward pass.
Figure 2: Reference Encoding. Initial identity anchoring is performed by processing geometric configuration (Conf.) and a reference image ( Iref ) through parallel encoding streams to produce structural embeddings Fobj and visual features Fref . These modalities are integrated by an Object Decoder using a query-key/value mechanism to generate Global Object Queries Pobj . This initialization is executed only once per sequence, providing persistent prototypes that maintain identity across the temporal horizon while minimizing per-frame computational overhead.
Figure 3: Compact Scalar Memory. Instance attributes [xc,yc,a,τ] are extracted from T frames and stacked into a resolution-invariant bank S∈R(N^×4) . This scalar abstraction ensures O(T⋅N^) memory complexity, decoupling VRAM overhead from spatial resolution.
Figure 4: Bidirectional Mask Decoder. Bidirectional Mask Decoder. Memory tokens Tmem and object queries Pobj undergo mutual refinement through symmetric decoder layers to yield image-conditioned features zmask and instance embeddings zobj . A final scaled dot-product generates the predicted masks zmask∈RN×N′ . This design decouples tracking capacity from network dimensions, enabling high-cardinality segmentation in a single pass.
Figure 5: Dataset Statistics. Our million-frame pipeline supports a three-stage curriculum: (a) Synthesis for geometric anchoring (972.9k frames), (b) Real-Unplugged for environment alignment, and (c) Real-Plugged for modeling complex occlusions and cable routing. The table (right) details the datasets statistics.
Model
Conf.
mIoU ↑
@.5 ↑
J&F↑
Inf. (ms) ↓
Param
VRAM (MB) ↓
SAM2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Tiny
0.276
0.289
0.375
404.9
38.96M
3359
SAM2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Small
0.157
0.137
0.229
407.0
46.06M
3454
SAM2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Base
0.252
0.269
0.336
425.0
80.85M
3565
SAM2.1-FT Ravi et al. (2024)
Base
0.360
0.416
0.474
425.0
80.85M
3565
SAM2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Large
0.290
0.316
0.383
456.3
224.45M
4128
SAM3 Carion et al. (2025)
–
0.346
0.442
0.418
973.1
860.06M
17506
Table 1: Quantitative Evaluation of Segmentation Capability. We compare our DetM-Tracker against foundation models (SAM 2/3), fine-tuned variants, and VOS baselines. Our model achieves superior segmentation fidelity while maintaining significantly lower inference latency and memory footprint.
Model
Conf.
Precision ↑
Recall ↑
F1 ↑
AP@50 ↑
SAM-2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Base-1P
0.188
0.161
0.170
0.053
SAM-2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Base-3P
0.277
0.269
0.269
0.138
SAM-2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Base-5P
0.312
0.311
0.308
0.167
SAM-2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Large-1P
0.255
0.222
0.233
0.092
SAM-2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Large-3P
0.332
0.316
0.320
0.192
SAM-2.1 Ravi et al. (2024)
Large-5P
0.351
0.343
0.344
0.223
Table 2: Detection Performance and Instance Robustness. Comparison against various foundation models, fine-tuned variants, and VOS baselines. DetM-Tracker achieves the highest stability and accuracy across all metrics.
Figure 6: Qualitative Comparison Across Environmental Complexities. While foundation models (SAM 2/3) exhibit mask bleeding and fragmentation in dense industrial arrays, DetM-Tracker maintains high topological fidelity. Especially in "Hard" scenarios with severe occlusions, our framework precisely resolves individual instance boundaries where baselines collapse into monolithic or incomplete masks.
Figure 7: Evaluation of Long-term Temporal Stability. Per-frame precision measured over a 300-frame industrial sequence. While foundation models like SAM 2.1 and LiVOS exhibit rapid precision decay and drift after initial frames, DetM-Tracker maintains near-optimal, consistent performance. Note the high-frequency fluctuations in SAM 3/3.1, indicating a lack of stable temporal memory for thin structures, whereas our framework effectively mitigates cumulative error.
Table 4: Tracking Robustness Across Different Cabinet Layouts. Performance under increasing occlusion difficulty and instance density. Env1 and Env2 feature different server/switch arrangements under realistic camera noise.
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Component
Specification
CPU
2 × AMD EPYC 7V12 (96 Cores)
RAM
1.8 TB
GPU
8 × NVIDIA A100-SXM4 (80GB)
Driver / CUDA
580.105.08 / 13.0
OS
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Appendix
Table 5: Hardware Infrastructure.
Hyperparameter
Stage-1
Stage-2
Stage-3
Architecture Settings
Backbone Architecture
Base (ViT-based)
Model Dimension ( dmodel )
512
Attention Heads ( nheads )
8
Transformer Layers
6
Patch Size
16
Appendix
Table 6: Multi-stage Training Configurations and Hyperparameters.
Model
Random
First
Max-coverage
Single-run
SAM 2
0.275 ( N=10 )
0.277 ( N=1 )
0.252 ( n pts, N=10 )
–
Cutie
0.335 ( N=10 )
0.276 ( N=1 )
0.277 ( N=1 )
–
LiVOS
0.102 ( N=10 )
0.079 ( N=1 )
0.077 ( N=1 )
–
Tracker
–
–
–
0.697 (No prompt, N=1 )
SAM 3
–
–
–
0.346 (Text prompt, N=1 )
Appendix
Table 7: Evaluation strategies and prompt frame sampling (reported metric: mIoU; N denotes the number of runs).
School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University, Shenzhen, China · Department of Automation and BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China