COCONut: Modernizing COCO Segmentation
Authors: Xueqing Deng, Qihang Yu, Peng Wang, Xiaohui Shen, Liang-Chieh Chen

In recent decades the vision community has witnessed remarkable progress in visual recognition partially owing to advancements in dataset benchmarks. Notably the established COCO benchmark has propelled the development of modern detection and segmentation systems. However the COCO segmentation benchmark has seen comparatively slow improvement over the last decade. Originally equipped with coarse polygon annotations for thing instances it gradually incorporated coarse superpixel annotations for stuff regions which were subsequently heuristically amalgamated to yield panoptic segmentation annotations. These annotations executed by different groups of raters have resulted not only in coarse segmentation masks but also in inconsistencies between segmentation types. In this study we undertake a comprehensive reevaluation of the COCO segmentation annotations. By enhancing the annotation quality and expanding the dataset to encompass 383K images with more than 5.18M panoptic masks we introduce COCONut the COCO Next Universal segmenTation dataset. COCONut harmonizes segmentation annotations across semantic instance and panoptic segmentation with meticulously crafted high-quality masks and establishes a robust benchmark for all segmentation tasks. To our knowledge COCONut stands as the inaugural large-scale universal segmentation dataset verified by human raters. We anticipate that the release of COCONut will significantly contribute to the community's ability to assess the progress of novel neural networks.