SiamPolar: Semi-supervised realtime video object segmentation with polar representation

Video object segmentation (VOS) is an essential part of autonomous vehicle navigation. Besides the accuracy metric, the real-time speed is very important for the algorithms of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised real-time method based on the Siamese network using a new polar representation. The input of bounding boxes are initialized rather than the object masks, which are applied to the video object detection tasks. The polar representation could reduce the parameters for encoding masks with subtle accuracy loss, so that the algorithm speed can be improved significantly. An asymmetric siamese network is also developed to extract the features from different spatial scales. Moreover, the peeling convolution is proposed to reduce the antagonism among the branches of the polar head. The repeated cross-correlation and semi-FPN are designed based on this idea. The experimental results on the DAVIS2016 dataset and other public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.