Improving Video Segmentation via Dynamic Anchor Queries

Modern video segmentation methods adopt object queries to perform inter-frame association and demonstrate satisfactory performance in tracking continuously appearing objects despite large-scale motion and transient occlusion. However, they all underperform on newly emerging and disappearing objects that are common in the real world because they attempt to model object emergence and disappearance through feature transitions between background and foreground queries that have significant feature gaps. We introduce Dynamic Anchor Queries (DAQ) to shorten the transition gap between the anchor and target queries by dynamically generating anchor queries based on the features of potential candidates. Furthermore, we introduce a query-level object Emergence and Disappearance Simulation (EDS) strategy, which unleashes the potential of DAQ without any additional cost. Finally, we combine our proposed DAQ and EDS with DVIS~\cite{zhang2023dvis} to obtain DVIS-DAQ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVIS-DAQ achieves a new SOTA performance on five mainstream video segmentation benchmarks. Code and models will be available for further study.