OpenVIS: Open-vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation

Open-vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (OpenVIS) can simultaneously detect, segment, and track arbitrary object categories in a video, without being constrained to categories seen during training. In this work, we propose In-stFormer, a carefully designed framework for the Open-VIS task that achieves powerful open-vocabulary capabilities through lightweight fine-tuning with limited-category data. InstFormer begins with the open-world mask proposal network, encouraged to propose all potential instance class-agnostic masks by the contrastive instance margin loss. Next, we introduce InstCLIP, adapted from pre-trained CLIP with Instance Guidance Attention, which encodes openvocabulary instance tokens efficiently. These instance tokens not only enable open-vocabulary classification but also offer strong universal tracking capabilities. Furthermore, to prevent the tracking module from being constrained by the training data with limited categories, we propose the universal rollout association, which transforms the tracking problem into predicting the next frame's instance tracking token. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed In-stFormer achieve state-of-the-art capabilities on a comprehensive OpenVIS evaluation benchmark, while also achieves competitive performance in fully supervised VIS task.