Object instance segmentation is one of the most fundamental but challenging tasks in computer vision, and it requires the pixel-level image understanding. Most existing approaches address this problem by adding a mask prediction branch to a two-stage object detector with the Region Proposal Network (RPN). Although producing good segmentation results, the efficiency of these two-stage approaches is far from satisfactory, restricting their applicability in practice. In this paper, we propose a one-stage framework, SPRNet, which performs efficient instance segmentation by introducing a single pixel reconstruction (SPR) branch to off-the-shelf one-stage detectors. The added SPR branch reconstructs the pixel-level mask from every single pixel in the convolution feature map directly. Using the same ResNet-50 backbone, SPRNet achieves comparable mask AP to Mask R-CNN at a higher inference speed, and gains all-round improvements on box AP at every scale comparing with RetinaNet.
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