COCONut: Modernizing COCO Segmentation
Authors: name: Xueqing Deng, name: Qihang Yu, name: Peng Wang, name: Xiaohui Shen, name: 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.