Instance Segmentation

Ask about this topic

Overview

Instance segmentation finds individual objects, distinguishes them from one another, and traces their boundaries, supporting tasks such as counting cells, inspecting products, and guiding robots. Common approaches include two-stage models such as Mask R-CNN, one-stage YOLO models, and query-based transformers such as Mask2Former; video methods add tracking or mask propagation to preserve identities across frames. Foundation models such as SAM can be adapted with prompts, while weak supervision, synthetic data, and self-supervised learning aim to reduce the cost of pixel-level annotations. Performance is tested on benchmarks such as COCO, LVIS, and YouTube-VIS, but crowded or occluded objects, fine boundaries, domain shifts, and the trade-off between accuracy and inference speed remain difficult.

Latest papers

CardsList

163 papers19 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. AVPS-360: A Spatial Audio-Visual Benchmark for Instance Segmentation and Tracking of Sound-Producing Persons

    Oct 29, 2026Yifu Sun, Parthasaarathy Sudarsanam, Tuomas Virtanen +1Audio-Visual UnderstandingInstance Segmentation

    Audio Research Group, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

  2. What Survives Label Downsampling? Exact Region Survival for Coarse Segmentation Targets

    Oct 29, 2026Zhiyuan Zhang, Yukun Ou, San Tek ChoiInstance Segmentation

    East China Jiaotong University · Imperial College London · University of Macau

  3. Analyzing Condensation on Patterned Surfaces via Deep Learning

    Oct 29, 2026Tae E. Cooper, Michael Gee, Sheila Whitman +5Image SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    School of Electrical, Computing, and Software Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. · John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. · Department of Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. +3

  4. The Power Watershed as a Differentiable Segmentation Layer

    Oct 28, 2026Galia Akl, Laurent Najman, Hugues TalbotImage SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    AUB · LIGM, KUSTAR · OPIS, CVN

  5. MixSIS: Mixed-supervised instance segmentation

    Oct 27, 2026Christian Wilms, Emre Gülsoylu, Sven Schreiber +1Instance SegmentationWeakly Supervised Image Segmentation

    Computer Vision Group, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

  6. Progressively Refining SAM for Accurate Phytoplankton Segmentation

    Oct 27, 2026Jialin Li, Jinkun Jiang, Yuezun Li +1Instance SegmentationSegment Anything Models

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China

  7. On Detection Reliability for Small Object Segmentation

    Oct 25, 2026Olivier RukundoImage SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering University of Limerick

  8. GeoPrompt: Geometry-Conditioned Prompt Learning for Underwater Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation

    Oct 25, 2026Shanshan Han, Yuxi Wang, Can Qin +4Instance SegmentationPrompt Learning

    Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China · Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

  9. SWIFT-Cell: Segmentation Without Iterative Flow Tracking

    Oct 21, 2026Devansh Lalwani, Swapnil Bhat, Muralikrishna H H +2Histopathology Image SegmentationComputational Pathology

    Turocrates.ai, Mumbai, India · Department of Pathology, ESIC Medical College and Hospital, Kalaburagi, Karnataka, India

  10. TEMPL: A Resource-Efficient and Transparent Model-Free Framework for Pseudo-Label Generation in Material CT Scans

    Oct 20, 2026Ashiqur Rahman, Venkata Devesh Reddy Seethi, Austin Yunker +2Image SegmentationPseudo-Labeling

    Department of Computer Science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA · Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA

  11. MaskMerge: Structure-aware Token Merging for Efficient Instance Segmentation

    Oct 16, 2026Bavesh Balaji, Letian Jiang, Alexander Wong +2Token MergingVisual Token Merging

    University Of Waterloo

  12. An Anatomy-Aware Staged Pipeline for Vessel-Specific Intracranial Aneurysm Segmentation in CT and MR Angiography

    Oct 15, 2026Gniewosz Drwiega, Wojciech Szymanski, Marek WodzinskiMedical Image SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    Sano – Centre for Computational Personalised Medicine, International Research Foundation, Kraków, Poland · AGH University of Krakow, Kraków, Poland

  13. Hybrid supervised instance segmentation by learning label noise suppression

    Oct 14, 2026Linwei Chen, Ying Fu, Shaodi You +1Instance SegmentationPseudo-Labeling

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China · Computer Vision Research Group, Insititute of Informatics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1098 XH, Netherlands · Beijing Key Laboratory of Information Service Engineering, Beijing Union University, Beijing 100101, China

  14. CryoTracer: A Synthetic-to-Real System for Filament Instance Tracing in Cryo-EM

    Oct 13, 2026Radosław Kuczbański, Wojciech Kozłowski, Mateusz Grzesiuk +4Electron MicroscopyCryo-Electron Microscopy

    WUST, Poland · ETH Zurich, Switzerland · Tooploox, Poland

  15. MvFFN: Multi-view Floor plan Feed-forward Network for Unposed Wide-Baseline Panorama Layout Reconstruction

    Oct 9, 2026Yuguang Li, Yichuan Deng, Zixuan Liu +5Indoor Scene ReconstructionMulti-View Geometry

    University of Washington · Independent Researcher

  16. Performance at What Cost? A Sustainability-Aware Performance Index for Cell and Nucleus Instance Segmentation

    Oct 7, 2026Eiram Mahera Sheikh, Alaa Tharwat, Wolfram SchenckInstance SegmentationCost-Aware Inference

    Department of Engineering and Mathematics, Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Interaktion 1, 33619 Bielefeld

  17. Towards benchmarking Western Bluebird detection in the wild

    Oct 6, 2026Estela Monserrat Arriaga Santana, Julian Rosas Scull, Ibeth P. Alarcón +3Open-Vocabulary Object DetectionInstance Segmentation

    Universidad Nacional Aut´onoma de M´exico, Mexico · Universidad Aut´onoma de Tlaxcala, Mexico · The University of Texas at El Paso, USA and INAOE, Mexico

  18. A Fully Automatic Pipeline for 3D Dendrite Instance Segmentation in SBF-SEM

    Oct 2, 2026Zewen Zhuo, Ilya Belevich, Eija Jokitalo +23D Instance SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    A.I. Virtanen Institute for Molecular Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland

  19. BeeWhere: Segmenting Bumble Bee Colonies to Quantify Behavioral Effects

    Oct 2, 2026Roberta Hunt, August Easton-Calabria, James CrallAnimal Behavior AnalysisWildlife Monitoring

    University of Copenhagen, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark · Lund University, 223 62 Lund, Sweden · University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA

  20. Towards Automatic Video Annotation with ASH: Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation

    Oct 1, 2026Arash Rocky, Q. M. Jonathan WuVideo Object SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, N9B 3P4, Canada

  21. UGO: Unified Architecture for General Multi-Object Tracking by Segmentation

    Sep 29, 2026Jer Pelhan, Alan Lukezic, Matej KristanInstance SegmentationMulti-Object Tracking

    Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana

  22. ProGuT: Label-Efficient Panoptic Segmentation for Forest Scenes

    Sep 29, 2026Pankaj Deoli, Karsten BernsImage SegmentationPanoptic Segmentation

    Robotics Research Lab, RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau Gottlieb-Daimler-Str. 48, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

  23. S4VY: Segment Anything in Feed-Forward 4D Visual Geometry

    Sep 29, 2026Jingdong Zhang, Xin Li, Jan Kautz +2Instance SegmentationPromptable Image Segmentation

    Texas A&M University, College Station · NVIDIA

  24. Learning to Reason with Persistent Object States for Video Instance Segmentation

    Sep 28, 2026Yongxue Xu, Boxue Yang, Ziqian Liu +3Video Object SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Sun Yat-sen University · Fudan University

  25. NucShare: Lightweight Nuclei Instance Segmentation with Foundation-Model Accuracy

    Sep 28, 2026Wenyan Li, Xiangyang Jia, Wenlong Zhong +1Efficient Neural Network InferenceHistopathology Image Segmentation

    School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

  26. Binaural Audio-Visual Instance Segmentation

    Sep 26, 2026Saijun Wang, Guanfeng Tang, Hongbo Zhao +4Audio-Visual UnderstandingInstance Segmentation

    College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China · College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Shanghai Institute of Intelligent Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

  27. BiCC: Bidirectional Connected-Component Loss for Instance-Aware Segmentation

    Sep 24, 2026Luc Bouteille, Frederic Jonske, Jens Kleesiek +1Instance SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    Institute for AI in Medicine (IKIM), University Hospital Essen, Essen, Germany · Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

  28. Latent Commonality Expectation-Maximisation for Box-supervised Tree Crown Instance Segmentation

    Sep 22, 2026Thomas Pitts, Kunqi Li, Bin LiangInstance SegmentationRemote Sensing Image Segmentation

    Department of Data Science, University of Technology Sydney

  29. SAM-V: Geometry-Aware Segment Anything for Multi-View Instance Segmentation

    Sep 21, 2026Jiangshan Gong, Yuqun Wu, Qiqian Fu +4Multi-View ConsistencyInstance Segmentation

    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · Meta

  30. SRPR-Net: Semantic and Relational Prompt Refinement for Automated SAM-based Instance Segmentation

    Sep 21, 2026Lufei Liu, Guojie Li, Suncheng Xiang +1Instance SegmentationPromptable Image Segmentation

    Ruijin-XJTLU Intelligent Medicine Institute, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China; and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China · School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China