Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation by Motion Grouping

Animals have evolved highly functional visual systems to understand motion, assisting perception even under complex environments. In this paper, we work towards developing a computer vision system able to segment objects by exploiting motion cues, i.e. motion segmentation. To achieve this, we introduce a simple variant of the Transformer to segment optical flow frames into primary objects and the background, which can be trained in a self-supervised manner, i.e. without using any manual annotations. Despite using only optical flow, and no appearance information, as input, our approach achieves superior results compared to previous state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on public benchmarks (DAVIS2016, SegTrackv2, FBMS59), while being an order of magnitude faster. On a challenging camouflage dataset (MoCA), we significantly outperform other self-supervised approaches, and are competitive with the top supervised approach, highlighting the importance of motion cues and the potential bias towards appearance in existing video segmentation models.