Mask Propagation for Efficient Video Semantic Segmentation

Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS) involves assigning a semantic label to each pixel in a video sequence. Prior work in this field has demonstrated promising results by extending image semantic segmentation models to exploit temporal relationships across video frames; however, these approaches often incur significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient mask propagation framework for VSS, called MPVSS. Our approach first employs a strong query-based image segmentor on sparse key frames to generate accurate binary masks and class predictions. We then design a flow estimation module utilizing the learned queries to generate a set of segment-aware flow maps, each associated with a mask prediction from the key frame. Finally, the mask-flow pairs are warped to serve as the mask predictions for the non-key frames. By reusing predictions from key frames, we circumvent the need to process a large volume of video frames individually with resource-intensive segmentors, alleviating temporal redundancy and significantly reducing computational costs. Extensive experiments on VSPW and Cityscapes demonstrate that our mask propagation framework achieves SOTA accuracy and efficiency trade-offs. For instance, our best model with Swin-L backbone outperforms the SOTA MRCFA using MiT-B5 by 4.0% mIoU, requiring only 26% FLOPs on the VSPW dataset. Moreover, our framework reduces up to 4x FLOPs compared to the per-frame Mask2Former baseline with only up to 2% mIoU degradation on the Cityscapes validation set. Code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/MPVSS.

Paper

Similar papers

Peer review

Reviewer cyWY6/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-04

Summary

This paper presents a mask propagation method, MPVSS, for video semantic segmentation (VSS). MPVSS uses Mask2Former to obtain mask predictions and queries from the key frame. Then, a motion encoder extracts pixel-wise motion from the key frame and its adjacent frame. The queries from the key frame are used to decode query-wise motion features. A flow head generates query-based flow maps, and binary mask predictions for the adjacent frame are generated by applying these flow maps to the binary mask predictions of the key frame. Semantic segmentations of non-key frames are produced by matrix multiplication between the key frame's query classification output and the binary mask prediction for the adjacent frame. A detailed ablation study validates each component. Comparisons between MPVSS and state-of-the-art methods on VSPW and Cityscapes demonstrate good performance and efficiency of MPVSS.

Strengths

This paper is well-written and easy to follow. Motivation leveraging motion estimation to reduce the computation of VSS is sound. The proposed method of propagating the key frame’s query to the motion features is interesting and novel. The experiments are well-designed, and the results are convincing.

Weaknesses

The key frames are selected at fixed intervals. As a result, the method may not fully address the mentioned redundancy problem. Efficiency of the proposed method should be discussed in more detail. For instance, MPVSS uses FlowNet to extract motion features between two frames instead of relying on a backbone network to extract frame-wise features. Fig3 (b), y axis label, “TLOPs” seems a typo. There is not much information about training time, and any particular training strategies used in the experiments.

Questions

Please see Weaknesses

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

The paper adequately addresses limitations.

Reviewer LSXE5/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-04

Summary

An efficient mask propagation framework for VSS, called MPVSS, is proposed in this paper. MPVSS adopts a strong query-based image segmentation based on sparse key frames and warp prediction to non-key frames by generating a segment-aware flow from a newly designed flow estimation module. With the proposed query-based flow, MPVSS achieves the performance of SOTA with a better efficiency.

Strengths

1. MPSVSS captures segment-level information between the video frames, which provides a better propagation result than the pixel-level correspondence information used in the previous work. 2. Compared with vanilla optical flow, query-based flow provides smooth and clear compensation for non-keyframes. 3. The proposed method achieves SOTA performance with significantly reduced computational cost through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks. 4. MPVSS delivers a consistently higher level of video consistency than its base network.

Weaknesses

1. typo: line 10: wrapped -> warped. 2. The proposed mask propagation framework is identical to that of DFF [1], Accel [2], and CoVOS [3], while the proposed query-based flow requires further experimentation to demonstrate its effectiveness. More specifically: - In Table 2, it is difficult to say whether the query-based flow is better than Accel [2] or DFF [1], because the MPVSS uses Mask2Former for key-frames segmentation. In order to prove the advantage of propagation using query-based flow over the propagation module in Accel and DFF, the keyframe segmentation network should be unified. - In Table 3a, the query-based flow does bring improvement, but it also introduces additional network parameters. It's hard to say whether the improvement is due to the increase in parameters. 3. Since propagation relies only on the previous keyframe, I wonder how occlusion will have a negative effect on the propagation results. There is literature using bi-directional motion vector for mask propagation [3] and shows that occlusion has a strong effect on the propagation results, especially causing ghosting effect, however this point is not discussed in the paper. 4. A measurement on the FPS should be provided. [1] Zhu, Xizhou, et al. "Deep feature flow for video recognition." CVPR. 2017. [2] Jain, Samvit, Xin Wang, and Joseph E. Gonzalez. "Accel: A corrective fusion network for efficient semantic segmentation on video." CVPR. 2019. [3] Xu, Kai, and Angela Yao. "Accelerating video object segmentation with compressed video." CVPR. 2022.

Questions

Please refer to the Weaknesses section.

Rating

5: Borderline accept: Technically solid paper where reasons to accept outweigh reasons to reject, e.g., limited evaluation. Please use sparingly.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

The authors adequately addressed limitation.

Reviewer 41Ay6/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-06

Summary

This paper presents an approach for video semantic segmentation (VSS) by focusing on the aspect of efficiency. The authors propose a novel mask propagation framework that is built upon a computationally intensive query-based image segmentor called Mask2Former[1]. Instead of processing every frame, the framework leverages the image segmentor to process only the key frames. To generate masks for non-key frames, a novel query-based flow map estimation module is introduced, which predicts optical flows to warp the masks from key frames. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance, with only a minimal drop of approximately 1% to 2% when compared to the baseline [1]. Notably, the proposed method achieves these results with significantly reduced Floating Point Operations (FLOPs). [1] B. Cheng, I. Misra, A. G. Schwing, A. Kirillov, and R. Girdhar. Masked-attention mask transformer for universal image segmentation. In CVPR, pages 1290–1299, 2022.

Strengths

1. The proposed method demonstrates competitive performance on two widely recognized benchmarks, showcasing only a slight decline in the mIoU score, ranging from 1% to 2%. These results are achieved while significantly reducing computation costs (FLOPs). 2. The novel query-based flow estimation module introduced in this paper surpasses traditional pixel-wise optical estimation methods by producing better flow maps. This advancement holds great promise for the field of transformer-based flow estimation.

Weaknesses

Please see my comments in below Questions section.

Questions

1. It would be inappropriate to claim that the proposed method (MPVSS) "achieves SOTA performance". From Table 1 and Table 2, it becomes evident that MPVSS yields slightly lower mIoU scores compared to its baseline counterpart (Mask2Former). Furthermore, Mask2Former already attains SOTA performance when compared to other methods presented in the table, so the primary contribution of MPVSS lies in its efficiency. Please kindly rectify these statements to accurately reflect the contributions of MPVSS. 2. It would be insightful to delve further into the reasons why the learned query from the mask generation branch (Q^k_O) enhances flow estimation. While the paper briefly touches upon this topic in a single sentence (line 220 - line 222), it would be great to include visualizations or attention maps that demonstrate the gain of the learned query on flow estimation. 3. In line 240 - line 242, two flows (query-based flow and pixel-based flow) are stacked to generate the final flow predictions. To gain a better understanding of the effect of the query-based flow, it would be helpful to visualize the query-based flow and pixel-based flow separately. Additionally, it would be beneficial to clarify whether the first row (i.e., Optical flow) in Table 3 (b) refers to the "pixel-based flow".

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

4 excellent

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

NA

Reviewer 8jSp3/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-07

Summary

The paper is to develop an approach to video semantic segmentation via propagating the segmented mask in key frames to non-key frames. Experiments were conducted on several databases with various comparisons.

Strengths

Focusing on improving the computational efficiency for video semantic segmentation; The paper is well-written.

Weaknesses

It seems that the work lacks of novelty. In my understanding, the key idea is to compute the mask in key frames, and then propagate the segmentation result to non-keyframes, in order to reduce the computation cost. However, in many previous video analysis works, doing many computation in key frames, and then applying the result to non-keyframes, is quite natural. The segmentation in key frames is performed by using an existing method, Mask2Former [7]. The flow estimation between frames is quite normal: using FlowNet [11] for motion encoding, and transformer based approach [7] for decoding. Not presenting a new method.

Questions

See my comments in the Weakness part.

Rating

3: Reject: For instance, a paper with technical flaws, weak evaluation, inadequate reproducibility and incompletely addressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

2 fair

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

2 fair

Limitations

limitation is talked in the paper.

Reviewer oxr66/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-07

Summary

This paper investigates an important and fundamental task: video semantic segmentation (VSS). While image semantic segmentation has received significant research attention, VSS has been relatively overlooked due to limited datasets and computational resources. This paper makes a valuable contribution to the field by proposing a method that combines a segmentation network with a flow network. Unlike traditional flow networks, the proposed approach employs query-based flow maps that correspond to each segment. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on two widely-used datasets, namely vspw and cityscape.

Strengths

1. The paper addresses an important but relatively underexplored task. 2. The combination of segmentation and optical flow in a single model is a novel approach, particularly considering the use of query-based flow maps. 3. The proposed method achieves commendable performance on standard datasets such as vspw and cityscape.

Weaknesses

1. The paper lacks specific details regarding the training of the flow modules. For example, what is the loss function used to train query-based flow? How are the flow networks (encoder/decoder) initilized? Do you use trained weights for these modules? Also, more visual examples about the query-based flow maps should be given. 2. The rationale behind utilizing both pixel-wise flow (F^{PF}) and query-based flow (F^{QF}) to generate query-based flow maps is not well-justified. In my opinion, pixel-wise flow is the flow map for every pixel while the query-based flow is only for specific segments. Equation 4, which concatenates both flows, may make the query-based flow not focus on the segments, but on all the pixels. 3. It would be helpful to include information on the number of parameters for all the methods listed in Table 1. Additionally, it would be beneficial to specify the frames per second (fps) achieved by the mask2former and mpvss methods using a single GPU for inference.

Questions

Please see the weakness

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

Please see the weakness

Reviewer LSXE2023-08-15

Thanks for the clarifications, I have raised score to 5. I am interested in the fact that you claimed that query-based optical flow can provide more stable and robust mask propagation than unidirectional optical flow. I look forward to the discussion and comparison between unidirectional OF, query-based flow and bidirectional OF.

Authorsrebuttal2023-08-18

Dear Reviewer LSXE, Thanks for your feedback and suggestions! We feel glad to address your questions and appreciate the constructive reviews for improving our work. For further investigation between uni-directional OF, query-based flow, and bi-directional OF, we run experiments on Cityscapes. **Query-based flow vs. uni-directional optical flow.** As discussed in Lines 353-356 in main paper, the proposed query-based flow is more robust to capture long-term temporal changing compared to using unidirectional optical flow. **Bi-directional optical flow vs. uni-directional optical flow.** As shown in Table G, bi-directional optical flow outperforms uni-directional optical flow in terms of mIoU scores as it fuses accurate semantic maps from two key frames. **Query-based flow vs. bi-directional optical flow.** The proposed query-based flow achieves better mIoU scores compared to bi-directional flow with fewer FLOPs for each single non-key frame. To further look into the segmentation performance, we visualized the qualitative results and found that bi-directional optical flow is ineffective when the two warped masks are not aligned well due to inaccurate *pixel-wise* flow prediction. Nevertheless, the proposed query-based flow provides a clear boundary and compensation for warping masks for irregular or small semantic segments because of the *segment-aware* flow estimation compared to using uni-directional or bi-directional optical flow. Because of the limitations on text-only responses during the discussion phase, we are unable to display visualizations here. We will include more quantitative and qualitative results for better illustration in the revised version. Table G: accuracy comparison (mIoU) for uni-directional optical flow, bi-directional optical flow and the proposed query-based flow. We also report computational efficiency in terms of FLOPs for each single non-key frame. | Backbone | Uni-directional OF | Bi-directional OF | Query-based flow | | :-----------: | :----------------: | :---------------: | :--------------: | | Swin-T | 79.6 | 80.2 | 80.7 | | Swin-B | 80.5 | 81.1 | 81.7 | | **FLOPs (G)** | 47.3 | 89.6 | 84.7 | Best regards, Authors of #6943

Reviewer cyWY2023-08-16

I have read the rebuttal and remain with my initial rating.

Area Chair M63S2023-08-16

Reviewer 8jSp

Dear Reviewer 8jSp, Could you please read the author's rebuttal and indicate whether it has changed your opinion? Currently, you are the only one with a reject rating, so your opinion is very important. Thank you. Best, AC

Area Chair M63S2023-08-18

Reviewer 41Ay

Dear Reviewer 41Ay, Could you please read the author's rebuttal and other reviews, and indicate whether your comments have been addressed? Thank you. Best, AC

Reviewer 41Ay2023-08-20

I have reviewed the rebuttal and the comments from other reviewers. I am maintaining my original rating - weak accept. Additionally, I would recommend incorporating the visualization into the supplementary materials, as it helps to demonstrate the learning of pixel-based flow and query-based flow respectively.

Area Chair M63S2023-08-18

Reviewer oxr6

Dear Reviewer oxr6, Could you please read the author's rebuttal and other reviews, and indicate whether your comments have been addressed? Thank you. Best, AC

Program Chairsdecision2023-09-21

Decision

Accept (poster)

© 2026 NYSGPT2525 LLC