PPML: Metric Learning with Prior Probability for Video Object Segmentation

Video object segmentation plays an important role in computer vision and has attracted much attention. Although many recent works have removed the fine-tuning process in pursuit of fast inference speed, while achieving high segmentation accuracy, they are still far from being real-time. In this paper, we regard this task as a feature matching problem and propose a prior probability based metric learning (PPML) method for faster inference speed and higher segmentation accuracy. The proposed method consists of two ingredients: a novel template space updating strategy that improves the efficiency of segmentation by avoiding the explosion of data in template space, and a novel feature matching method which applies more potential probability information through integrating the prior of the first frame and the predicted score of previous frames. Experimental results on DAVIS datasets demonstrate that the proposed method reaches the state-of-the-art competitive performance and is more efficient in time consumption.