Papers › PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering

PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering

17 Dec 2019CVPR 2020 6arXiv:1912.08193archive 2025-07-28

Alexander Kirillov, Yuxin Wu, Kaiming He, Ross Girshick

We present a new method for efficient high-quality image segmentation of objects and scenes. By analogizing classical computer graphics methods for efficient rendering with over- and undersampling challenges faced in pixel labeling tasks, we develop a unique perspective of image segmentation as a rendering problem. From this vantage, we present the PointRend (Point-based Rendering) neural network module: a module that performs point-based segmentation predictions at adaptively selected locations based on an iterative subdivision algorithm. PointRend can be flexibly applied to both instance and semantic segmentation tasks by building on top of existing state-of-the-art models. While many concrete implementations of the general idea are possible, we show that a simple design already achieves excellent results. Qualitatively, PointRend outputs crisp object boundaries in regions that are over-smoothed by previous methods. Quantitatively, PointRend yields significant gains on COCO and Cityscapes, for both instance and semantic segmentation. PointRend's efficiency enables output resolutions that are otherwise impractical in terms of memory or computation compared to existing approaches. Code has been made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/tree/master/projects/PointRend.

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Code

Syntology Ran 5 of 18 code samples harvested from 3 repositories linked to this paper; 13 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 3 ran · our draft was wrong; 2 ran with no contract checked.

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14 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

facebookresearch/detectron2 officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report
2020-sk49/VFOST mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
CuberrChen/PointRend-Paddle mentioned on GitHubpaddleApache-2.0 report
JamesQFreeman/PointRend mentioned on GitHub report
ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
elliottwu/sorderender mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
hhhhnwl/PointRend-simple-pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
kmswlee/ainized-PointRend mentioned on GitHub report
saehan-choi/pixellib_auto_labelling mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
zsef123/PointRend-PyTorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
open-mmlab/mmdetection pytorchApache-2.0 report
open-mmlab/mmsegmentation pytorchApache-2.0 report

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convert_basic_c2_names ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/torchbackend/instance/checkpoint/c2_model_loading.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · e8526a516b4f9206 · report
convert_c2_detectron_names ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/torchbackend/instance/checkpoint/c2_model_loading.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · e36f87059208bb7e · report
get_test_config CuberrChen/PointRend-Paddle/val.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 20eb3e6b0aba73e4 · report
getpoint JamesQFreeman/PointRend/pointGenerate.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 1fe9d10d9e769de8 · report
partition_list CuberrChen/PointRend-Paddle/paddleseg/core/predict.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 2f75a098ce9f7b0e · report
align_and_update_state_dicts ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/torchbackend/instance/checkpoint/c2_model_loading.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · ac2638463572c152 · report
compute_backbone_shapes ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/instance/mask_rcnn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 18ea12b2eeecd592 · report
compute_iou ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/instance/utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 64403fb78c59e685 · report
compute_overlaps ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/instance/utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 8ee1bf912c0d3692 · report
conv_block ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/instance/mask_rcnn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 0c9b8c863cf414f7 · report
extract_bboxes ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/instance/utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 75499b9fb42b31f7 · report
flip_combination CuberrChen/PointRend-Paddle/paddleseg/core/infer.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 95bccf5957a196e4 · report
get_color_map_list CuberrChen/PointRend-Paddle/utils/gray2pseudo_color.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4a169e8f6527333b · report
get_files CuberrChen/PointRend-Paddle/utils/create_dataset_list.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 10c053391f452886 · report
get_image_list CuberrChen/PointRend-Paddle/predict.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · c8f710d7401e0006 · report
get_reverse_list CuberrChen/PointRend-Paddle/paddleseg/core/infer.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 026fee631ce4a66c · report
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identity_block ayoolaolafenwa/PixelLib/pixellib/instance/mask_rcnn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 4ea5e920502e7ce7 · report

Tasks

Image SegmentationInstance SegmentationSegmentationSemantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Instance Segmentation COCO 2017 val PointRend (MaskR-CNN, ResNet-50-FPN) mask AP* 39.7 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation Cityscapes val PointRend mask AP 35.8 #17 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes val SemanticFPN P2-P5 + PointRend mIoU 78.6 #60 of 99 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionASPPBatch NormalizationConvolutionDeepLabv3Dense ConnectionsDilated ConvolutionFPNFeedforward NetworkGroup NormalizationLinear WarmupMask R-CNNPanoptic FPNPointRendRPNRandom Horizontal FlipRandom ScalingReLURoIAlignSGD with MomentumSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxSpatial Pyramid PoolingWeight Decay

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