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. PMT: Plain Mask Transformer for Image and Video Segmentation with Frozen Vision Encoders

    Mar 26, 2026Niccolò Cavagnero, Narges Norouzi, Gijs Dubbelman +1Image SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

    Eindhoven University of Technology

  2. UW-VOS: A Large-Scale Dataset for Underwater Video Object Segmentation

    Mar 25, 2026Hongshen Zhao, Jingkang Tai, Yuhang Wu +5Video Object SegmentationUnderwater Imaging

    Southeast University

  3. Re-Prompting SAM 3 via Object Retrieval: 3rd of the 5th PVUW MOSE Track

    Mar 24, 2026Mingqi Gao, Sijie Li, Jungong HanQuery Re-IdentificationVideo Object Segmentation

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

  4. CataractSAM-2: A Domain-Adapted Model for Anterior Segment Surgery Segmentation and Scalable Ground-Truth Annotation

    Mar 23, 2026Mohammad Eslami, Dhanvinkumar Ganeshkumar, Saber Kazeminasab +8Medical Image SegmentationSurgical Video Understanding

    Harvard Ophthalmology AI Lab, Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA · Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Chantilly, Virginia, USA · Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

  5. Learning Trajectory-Aware Multimodal Large Language Models for Video Reasoning Segmentation

    Mar 23, 2026Jingnan Luo, Mingqi Gao, Jun Liu +2Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

    Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. · Tencent YouTu Lab, Shenzhen, China.

  6. Scene Graph-guided SegCaptioning Transformer with Fine-grained Alignment for Controllable Video Segmentation and Captioning

    Mar 21, 2026Xu Zhang, Jin Yuan, BinHong Yang +5Video CaptioningVideo Object Segmentation

    the College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China. · the School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, P.R. China. · CRRC Zhuzhou Institute Company Ltd., Zhuzhou, Hunan 412001, China. +2

  7. Eye image segmentation using visual and concept prompts with Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3)

    Mar 18, 2026Diederick C. Niehorster, Marcus NyströmMedical Image SegmentationPromptable Image Segmentation

    Lund University Humanities Lab & Dept. of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden · Lund University Humanities Lab, Lund, Sweden

  8. Show Me When and Where: Towards Referring Video Object Segmentation in the Wild

    Mar 15, 2026Mingqi Gao, Jinyu Yang, Jingnan Luo +4Multimodal TransformerReferring Video Object Segmentation

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China · Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, Coventry CV1 7AL, U.K. · Tapall.ai, Shenzhen 518055, China +3

  9. Towards Visual Query Segmentation in the Wild

    Mar 9, 2026Bing Fan, Minghao Li, Hanzhi Zhang +6Video Object SegmentationSegment Anything Models

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas

  10. Training-free Temporal Object Tracking in Surgical Videos

    Mar 8, 2026Subhadeep Koley, Abdolrahim Kadkhodamohammadi, Santiago Barbarisi +2Visual Object TrackingSurgical Video Understanding

    Medtronic plc., London, UK. · UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, London, UK.

  11. MotionBits: Video Segmentation through Motion-Level Analysis of Rigid Bodies

    Mar 6, 2026Howard H. Qian, Kejia Ren, Yu Xiang +2Motion SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

    Department of Computer Science Rice University · Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Dallas

  12. A multi-center analysis of deep learning methods for video polyp detection and segmentation

    Mar 4, 2026Noha Ghatwary, Pedro Chavarias Solano, Mohamed Ramzy Ibrahim +24Medical Image AnalysisPolyp Segmentation

    Computer Engineering Department, Arab Academy for Science and Technology,Egypt · AI in Medicine and Surgery Group, School of Computer Science, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK · Department of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Systems, University of Würzburg, Germany +13

  13. Training-Free Spatio-temporal Decoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with Adaptive Object Memory

    Mar 2, 2026Zhengtong Zhu, Jiaqing Fan, Zhixuan Liu +1Video Object SegmentationReasoning Segmentation

    School of Computer Science & Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, China

  14. 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

  15. CMSA-Net: Causal Multi-scale Aggregation with Adaptive Multi-source Reference for Video Polyp Segmentation

    Feb 26, 2026Tong Wang, Yaolei Qi, Siwen Wang +3Causal AttentionPolyp Segmentation

    Southeast University, China · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), UAE

  16. Understanding Annotation Error Propagation and Learning an Adaptive Policy for Expert Intervention in Barrett's Video Segmentation

    Feb 25, 2026Lokesha Rasanjalee, Jin Lin Tan, Dileepa Pitawela +2Interactive Medical Image SegmentationHuman-in-the-Loop Annotation

    School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Adelaide University, Australia · The Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML), Australia · Adelaide Medical School, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Adelaide University, Australia +1

  17. VidEoMT: Your ViT is Secretly Also a Video Segmentation Model

    Feb 19, 2026Narges Norouzi, Idil Esen Zulfikar, Niccolò Cavagnero +4Video Object SegmentationVision Transformer

    Eindhoven University of Technology · RWTH Aachen University

  18. 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

  19. UnSAMv2: Self-Supervised Learning Enables Segment Anything at Any Granularity

    Nov 17, 2025Junwei Yu, Trevor Darrell, XuDong WangImage SegmentationPromptable Image Segmentation

    UC Berkeley

  20. RefAM: Attention Magnets for Zero-Shot Referral Segmentation

    Sep 26, 2025Anna Kukleva, Enis Simsar, Alessio Tonioni +4Attention MechanismsImage Segmentation

    Max Planck Institute for Informatics, SIC · ETH Zürich · Google +1

  21. Phantom-Insight: Adaptive Multi-cue Fusion for Video Camouflaged Object Detection with Multimodal LLM

    Sep 8, 2025Hua Zhang, Changjiang LuoVideo Object SegmentationVision Foundation Model Adaptation

    Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

  22. SlotMatch: Distilling Object-Centric Representations for Unsupervised Video Segmentation

    Aug 5, 2025Diana-Nicoleta Grigore, Neelu Madan, Andreas Mogelmose +2Video Object SegmentationVideo Object-Centric Learning

    University of Bucharest, Romania · Aalborg University, Denmark

  23. Moving Object Detection from Moving Camera Using Focus of Expansion Likelihood and Segmentation

    Jul 18, 2025Masahiro Ogawa, Qi An, Atsushi YamashitaVideo Object SegmentationObject Detection

    Department of Precision Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Japan · Department of Human and Engineered Environmental Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan

  24. DiDA: Video Object Segmentation with Distillation Learning of Deformable Attention

    Jan 25, 2024Quang-Trung Truong, Duc Thanh Nguyen, Binh-Son Hua +1Video Object SegmentationTransformer Attention

    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Deakin University · Trinity College Dublin