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. From Local Matches to Global Masks: Template-Guided Instance Detection and Segmentation in Open-World Scenes

    Mar 3, 2026Qifan Zhang, Sai Haneesh Allu, Jikai Wang +2Instance SegmentationObject Detection

    Intelligent Robotics and Vision Lab, The University of Texas at Dallas

  2. SEP-YOLO: Fourier-Domain Feature Representation for Transparent Object Instance Segmentation

    Mar 3, 2026Fengming Zhang, Tao Yan, Jianchao HuangInstance SegmentationBoundary-Aware Segmentation

    Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China

  3. SeaVIS: Sound-Enhanced Association for Online Audio-Visual Instance Segmentation

    Mar 2, 2026Yingjian Zhu, Ying Wang, Yuyang Hong +5Instance SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

    School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 101408, China. · State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. · National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. +2

  4. GDA-YOLO11: Amodal Instance Segmentation for Occlusion-Robust Robotic Fruit Harvesting

    Feb 27, 2026Caner Beldek, Emre Sariyildiz, Son Lam Phung +1Amodal SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    School of Engineering, University of Wollongong, 2522, NSW, Australia

  5. D-FINE-seg: Object Detection and Instance Segmentation Framework with multi-backend deployment

    Feb 26, 2026Argo Saakyan, Dmitry SolntsevInstance SegmentationDetection Transformer

    Veryfi Inc.

  6. SAPNet++: Evolving Point-Prompted Instance Segmentation with Semantic and Spatial Awareness

    Feb 25, 2026Zhaoyang Wei, Xumeng Han, Xuehui Yu +4Instance SegmentationWeakly Supervised Image Segmentation

    the School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Science (UCAS), Beijing, 100049, China. · School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), Shanghai, 200240, China. · the School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Science (UCAS), Beijing, 100049, China.

  7. CAD-Prompted SAM3: Geometry-Conditioned Instance Segmentation for Industrial Objects

    Feb 24, 2026Zhenran Tang, Rohan Nagabhirava, Changliu LiuImage SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  8. Conformal Prediction Sets for Instance Segmentation

    Feb 10, 2026Kerri Lu, Dan M. Kluger, Stephen Bates +1Image SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA · Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA +1

  9. LSP-DETR: Efficient and Scalable Nuclei Segmentation in Whole-Slide Images

    Jan 6, 2026Matěj Pekár, Vít Musil, Rudolf Nenutil +2Computational PathologyImage Segmentation

    Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics, Botanická 68a, Brno, 602 00, Czech Republic · Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute, Žlutý kopec 7, Brno, 656 53, Czech Republic · BBMRI-ERIC, Neue Stiftingtalstraße 2/B/6, Graz, 8010, Austria

  10. ELVIS: Enhance Low-Light for Video Instance Segmentation in the Dark

    Dec 1, 2025Joanne Lin, Ruirui Lin, Yini Li +2Video Instance SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    Visual Information Laboratory, University of Bristol

  11. SilvaScenes: Tree Detection and Species Classification from Under-Canopy Images in Natural Forests

    Oct 10, 2025David-Alexandre Duclos, William Guimont-Martin, Gabriel Jeanson +7Instance SegmentationTree Species Classification

    Northern Robotics Laboratory, Universit´e Laval, Qu´ebec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada · D´epartement des sciences du bois et de la forˆet, Universit´e Laval, Qu´ebec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada · Institut des Sciences de la Forˆet temp´er´ee, Universit´e du Qu´ebec en Outaouais, Ripon, QC, J0V 1V0, Canada

  12. EM3M: An Electron Micrograph Dataset for Microstructural Segmentation and Generation

    Aug 22, 2025Nan Wang, Zhiyi Xia, Yiming Li +7Synthetic Data AugmentationInstance Segmentation

    DP Technology, Beijing, China

  13. Comparing YOLOv11 and YOLOv8 for instance segmentation of occluded and non-occluded immature green fruits in complex orchard environment

    Oct 24, 2024Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj KarkeeAgricultural Image AnalysisInstance Segmentation

    Washington State University Department of Biological Systems Engineering