Video Object Segmentation

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Overview

Video object segmentation studies how to identify an object in a video and maintain an accurate pixel-level mask as it moves, changes appearance, disappears, or reappears. Common approaches propagate masks using temporal attention, object queries, optical flow, or memory banks; newer systems adapt promptable foundation models such as SAM2 and SAM3, sometimes guided by language, audio, or 3D geometry. Researchers evaluate these methods on benchmarks such as DAVIS, YouTube-VOS, MOSE, and long-video or referring-segmentation datasets, with growing attention to real-time, medical, low-light, and other specialized settings. A central challenge is balancing long-term identity and temporal stability against memory use and inference speed, especially when targets are absent or ambiguous and benchmarks may not fully capture those failures.

Latest papers

CardsList

114 papers16 papers in the last four weeks, up 78% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. ProMo3D: Probing Motion Cues in Frozen 3D Foundation Models

    Oct 24, 2026Xiaoang Zhang, Mert Kiray, Yordanka Velikova +2Motion Segmentation3D Foundation Models

    Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Germany · Obsphera, Munich, Germany

  2. Lightweight Frame Compensation for Real-Time Polyp Segmentation under Frame Skipping

    Oct 22, 2026Weihao GaoPolyp SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

    School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Guangdong University of Education, Guangzhou 510303, China

  3. OccJEPA: Occlusion as Masking for Amodal Video Segmentation

    Oct 21, 2026Genpei ZhangAmodal SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

    Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison

  4. Weakly Supervised Fish Segmentation through Point-Supervised Tracking and Motion-Informed Language

    Oct 21, 2026Vedanth Kallakuri, Katherine A. SkinnerImage SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

  5. Think Visually Across Space and Time: Grounded Reasoning for Video Segmentation

    Oct 18, 2026Junwei Wen, Deshui Miao, Guangming Lu +3Temporal Reasoning in VLMsVideo Object Segmentation

    Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · University of California at Merced · Pengcheng Laboratory +1

  6. ATLAS: Learning to Adapt LVLM Attention for Reasoning Video Segmentation

    Oct 17, 2026Hamidreza Dastmalchi, Ali Cheraghian, Aijun An +2Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

    York University · Macquarie University · CSIRO Data61

  7. OLiVES: An Outdoor Low-Light Video Benchmark for Enhancement and Segmentation

    Oct 14, 2026Yini Li, Joanne Lin, David Blackham +2Low-Light Image EnhancementVideo Object Segmentation

    Visual Information Laboratory University of Bristol Bristol, United Kingdom

  8. SAM3RL: Memory Control via Reinforcement Learning for Visual Object Tracking

    Oct 14, 2026Tomáš Čížek, Matej Straka, Illia Volkov +5Visual Object TrackingVideo Object Segmentation

    Charles University, Prague · Czech Technical University in Prague · University of Oxford +1

  9. When Trackers Fail: VLM-Guided Verification and Recovery for Robust Video Object Segmentation

    Oct 11, 2026Valay Bundele, Susmit Agrawal, Mehran Hosseinzadeh +2Visual Object TrackingVideo Object Segmentation

    University of Tübingen, Germany · Woven by Toyota, Japan

  10. When Predicting Nothing Beats SAM 3: Revisiting Evaluation in Video Object Segmentation

    Oct 2, 2026Jihwan Hong, Woohyeon Park, Jaeik Kim +1Video Object SegmentationVisual Object Tracking

    AIDAS Laboratory, 1IPAI & 2ECE, Seoul National University

  11. FiVOS: A Fish Segmentation Algorithm Based on Interactive Video Object Segmentation and Filter Enhancement

    Oct 1, 2026Yuqing Duan, Song Zhang, Shili Zhao +2Video Object Segmentation

    National Innovation Center for Digital Fishery, China Agricultural University, Beijing 10083, China · Key Laboratory of Smart Farming Technologies for Aquatic Animal and Livestock, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, China Agricultural University, Beijing 10083, China · Beijing Engineering and Technology Research Center for Internet of Things in Agriculture, China Agricultural University, Beijing 10083, China +1

  12. 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

  13. Event-Driven Refresh and Recurrence Memory to Reduce Stale Grounding in Referring Video Object Segmentation

    Sep 30, 2026Abu Hanif Muhammad Syarubany, Jaehyun Jang, Siwoo Lim +2Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

    School of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea

  14. Hard-Region Supervision: #1 on the Waymo Open Dataset 2D Video Panoptic Segmentation Leaderboard

    Sep 30, 2026Jinghan YangPanoptic SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

  15. 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

  16. LVMT: Video Mask Transformer for Long-term Video Segmentation

    Sep 28, 2026Narges Norouzi, Niccolò Cavagnero, Idil Esen Zulfikar +3Truncated Backpropagation Through TimeVideo Object Segmentation

    Eindhoven University of Technology · RWTH Aachen University

  17. MoVISA: Multi-Token Reasoning for Video Object Segmentation

    Sep 24, 2026Ruining Zhao, Ho Kei Cheng, Alexander G SchwingVideo Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  18. SWT: Self-Supervised Video Object Segmentation via Sliding, Wavelet and Transportation

    Sep 22, 2026Zhengtong Zhu, Jiaqing Fan, Hanwen Qian +1Video Object Segmentation

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, China

  19. Image Frame Dynamic Object Segmentation and Ego Motion Estimation using Radar Image Fusion

    Sep 19, 2026Astik Srivastava, Suhani Grover, Avinash Sharma +1Autonomous Driving PerceptionVideo Object Segmentation

  20. TEDi: Temporal Memory-Enhanced and Denoising Transformer for Surgical Instrument Segmentation

    Sep 15, 2026Jiahong Yuan, Weiming Mi, Tao Zhang +1Video Object SegmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Surgical Planning Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, United States

  21. DynEoMT: Learning Object Dynamicity from Online Segmentation Queries

    Sep 13, 2026Calvin Galagain, Martyna Poreba, François GouletteVideo Object SegmentationVideo Instance Segmentation

    Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, List, F-91120 Palaiseau, France · U2IS, ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 91120, Palaiseau, France

  22. Segment Any Motion with Radar: Robust Multimodal Moving-Object Segmentation and Tracking

    Sep 8, 2026Jue Wang, Xuan Wang, Hao Zhou +6Camera-Radar FusionVideo Object Segmentation

    Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · Great Bay University, Dongguan, China · Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China

  23. WSPolypNet: Weakly Supervised Polyp Localization in Colonoscopy Videos

    Sep 8, 2026Giseong Hwang, Minjae Jo, Yeonghyeon Park +9Video Object SegmentationWeakly Supervised Learning

    Seoul National University · NVIDIA AI Technology Center

  24. Report of the 8th LSVOS Challenge: Complex and Multimodal Video Object Segmentation

    Sep 5, 2026Chang Liu, Henghui Ding, Lingyi Hong +36Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

    Institute of Big Data, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

  25. ENEAS: Embedding-guided Neural Ensemble for Adaptive Segmentation

    Sep 3, 2026Javier del Pino, Salvador Rodríguez, Alejandro Garabito +2Video Object SegmentationInstance Segmentation

    SperidLabs

  26. PhysMLLMs: Spatial Priors for Unified Referring Segmentation and Grounded Reasoning of Images and Videos

    Aug 25, 2026Siyao Yan, Bo Han, Jisheng Dang +7Referring Video Object SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

    School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China · School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 510006, China · School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 119077, Singapore

  27. MLLM-Assisted Audio VOS: A 3rd Place Report for the MeViS-Audio Track, 8th LSVOS Challenge

    Aug 24, 2026Liangtao Shi, Jinxia Xie, Xiantao Hu +1Video Object Segmentation

    Hefei University of Technology · Nanjing University of Science and Technology · Hunan Police College

  28. RS3^3-Prune: Read-Sparse, Store-Sparse Token Pruning for Video Object Segmentation

    Aug 23, 2026Avilasha Mandal, Sarvesh ShashikumarVideo Object SegmentationVideo Token Compression

    Attentive AI · Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

  29. SAM3Dual: A 3rd Place Solution to the MOSEv2 Track, 8th LSVOS Challenge

    Aug 23, 2026JeongRae Kim, Chaehyun Kim, Changwon LimVideo Object Segmentation

    Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  30. Competitive Memory Readout for Robust Video Object Segmentation: 2nd Place Technical Report for the MOSEv2 Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge

    Aug 22, 2026Mingqi Gao, Sijie Li, Jungong HanVideo Object SegmentationSegment Anything Models

    School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield · Department of Automation, Tsinghua University