Dense Point-to-Mask Optimization with Reinforced Point Selection for Crowd Instance Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Hongru, Huang, Jiyang, Wan, Jia, Chan, Antoni B.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chen, Hongru
Huang, Jiyang
Wan, Jia
Chan, Antoni B.
author_facet Chen, Hongru
Huang, Jiyang
Wan, Jia
Chan, Antoni B.
contents Crowd instance segmentation is a crucial task with a wide range of applications, including surveillance and transportation. Currently, point labels are common in crowd datasets, while region labels (e.g., boxes) are rare and inaccurate. The masks obtained through segmentation help to improve the accuracy of region labels and resolve the correspondence between individual location coordinates and crowd density maps. However, directly applying currently popular large foundation models such as SAM does not yield ideal results in dense crowds. To this end, we first propose Dense Point-to-Mask Optimization (DPMO), which integrates SAM with the Nearest Neighbor Exclusive Circle (NNEC) constraint to generate dense instance segmentation from point annotations. With DPMO and manual correction, we obtain mask annotations from the existing point annotations for traditional crowd datasets. Then, to predict instance segmentation in dense crowds, we propose a Reinforced Point Selection (RPS) framework trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which selects the best predicted point from a sampling of the initial point prediction. Through extensive experiments, we achieve state-of-the-art crowd instance segmentation performance on ShanghaiTech, UCF-QNRF, JHU-CROWD++, and NWPU-Crowd datasets. Furthermore, we design new loss functions supervised by masks that boost counting performance across different models, demonstrating the significant role of mask annotations in enhancing counting accuracy.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01742
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dense Point-to-Mask Optimization with Reinforced Point Selection for Crowd Instance Segmentation
Chen, Hongru
Huang, Jiyang
Wan, Jia
Chan, Antoni B.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Crowd instance segmentation is a crucial task with a wide range of applications, including surveillance and transportation. Currently, point labels are common in crowd datasets, while region labels (e.g., boxes) are rare and inaccurate. The masks obtained through segmentation help to improve the accuracy of region labels and resolve the correspondence between individual location coordinates and crowd density maps. However, directly applying currently popular large foundation models such as SAM does not yield ideal results in dense crowds. To this end, we first propose Dense Point-to-Mask Optimization (DPMO), which integrates SAM with the Nearest Neighbor Exclusive Circle (NNEC) constraint to generate dense instance segmentation from point annotations. With DPMO and manual correction, we obtain mask annotations from the existing point annotations for traditional crowd datasets. Then, to predict instance segmentation in dense crowds, we propose a Reinforced Point Selection (RPS) framework trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which selects the best predicted point from a sampling of the initial point prediction. Through extensive experiments, we achieve state-of-the-art crowd instance segmentation performance on ShanghaiTech, UCF-QNRF, JHU-CROWD++, and NWPU-Crowd datasets. Furthermore, we design new loss functions supervised by masks that boost counting performance across different models, demonstrating the significant role of mask annotations in enhancing counting accuracy.
title Dense Point-to-Mask Optimization with Reinforced Point Selection for Crowd Instance Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01742