PolarNeXt: Rethink Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation

One of the roadblocks for instance segmentation today is heavy computational overhead and model parameters. Previous methods based on Polar Representation made the initial mark to address this challenge by formulating instance segmentation as polygon detection, but failed to align with mainstream methods in performance. In this paper, we highlight that Representation Errors, arising from the limited capacity of polygons to capture boundary details, have long been overlooked, which results in severe performance degradation. Observing that optimal starting point selection effectively alleviates this issue, we propose an Adaptive Polygonal Sample Decision strategy to dynamically capture the positional variation of representation errors across samples. Additionally, we design a Union-aligned Rasterization Module to incorporate these errors into polygonal assessment, further advancing the proposed strategy. With these components, our framework called PolarNeXt achieves a remarkable performance boost of over 4.8% AP compared to other polar-based methods. PolarNeXt is markedly more lightweight and efficient than state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods, while achieving comparable segmentation accuracy. We expect this work will open up a new direction for instance segmentation in high-resolution images and resource-limited scenarios.