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Technical GlossaryComputer Vision

Instance Segmentation

A task that distinguishes individual objects of the same class and produces a pixel mask for each one.

Instance segmentation goes beyond semantic segmentation by separating individual objects belonging to the same class. For example, instead of labeling all people in a scene simply as "person," it produces a distinct mask for each one. This is critical for counting, robotic grasping, inventory analysis, and scene interaction tasks. Mask R-CNN is one of the historically most influential examples of this approach.