Context-Aware Relative Object Queries to Unify Video Instance and Panoptic Segmentation

Object queries have emerged as a powerful abstraction to generically represent object proposals. However, their use for temporal tasks like video segmentation poses two questions: 1) How to process frames sequentially and propagate object queries seamlessly across frames. Using independent object queries per frame doesn't permit tracking, and requires post-processing. 2) How to produce temporally consistent, yet expressive object queries that model both appearance and position changes. Using the entire video at once doesn't capture position changes and doesn't scale to long videos. As one answer to both questions we propose 'context-aware relative object queries', which are continuously propagated frame-by-frame. They seamlessly track objects and deal with occlusion and re-appearance of objects, without post-processing. Further, we find context-aware relative object queries better capture position changes of objects in motion. We evaluate the proposed approach across three challenging tasks: video instance segmentation, multi-object tracking and segmentation, and video panoptic segmentation. Using the same approach and architecture, we match or surpass state-of-the art results on the diverse and challenging OVIS, Youtube-VIS, Cityscapes-VPS, MOTS 2020 and KITTI-MOTS data.