MWVOS: Mask-Free Weakly Supervised Video Object Segmentation via promptable foundation model

The current state-of-the-art techniques for video object segmentation necessitate extensive training on video datasets with mask annotations, thereby constraining their ability to transfer zero-shot learning to new image distributions and tasks. However, recent advancements in foundation models, particularly in the domain of image segmentation, have showcased robust generalization capabilities, introducing a novel prompt-driven paradigm for a variety of downstream segmentation challenges on new data distributions. This study delves into the potential of vision foundation models using diverse prompt strategies and proposes a mask-free approach for unsupervised video object segmentation. To further improve the efficacy of prompt learning in diverse and complex video scenes, we introduce a spatial–temporal decoupled deformable attention mechanism to establish an effective correlation between intra- and inter-frame features. Extensive experiments conducted on the DAVIS2017-unsupervised and YoutubeVIS19&21 and OIVS datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach without mask supervision when compared to existing mask-supervised methods, as well as its capacity to generalize to weakly-annotated video datasets.