Foreground object segmentation is a critical step for many image analysis tasks. While automated methods can produce high-quality results, their failures disappoint users in need of practical solutions. We propose a resource allocation framework for predicting how best to allocate a fixed budget of human annotation effort in order to collect higher quality segmentations for a given batch of images and automated methods. The framework is based on a prediction module that estimates the quality of given algorithm-drawn segmentations. We demonstrate the value of the framework for two novel tasks related to predicting how to distribute annotation efforts between algorithms and humans. Specifically, we develop two systems that automatically decide, for a batch of images, when to recruit humans versus computers to create (1) coarse segmentations required to initialize segmentation tools and (2) final, fine-grained segmentations. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of relying on a mix of human and computer efforts over relying on either resource alone for segmenting objects in images coming from three diverse modalities (visible, phase contrast microscopy, and fluorescence microscopy).
Our novel tasks rely on a module to estimate the quality of computer-generated segmentations. Related methods find top object-like" region proposals for a given image @cite_42 @cite_13 @cite_37 @cite_26 @cite_12 . However, most of these methods are inadequate for ranking object-like" proposals across a batch of images because they only return relative rankings of proposals per image @cite_37 . Another method proposes an absolute segmentation difficulty measure based on the image content alone @cite_39 . However, this method does not account for the different performances that are observed from different segmentation tools when applied to the same image.
@cite_37 @cite_26 @cite_42 @cite_39 @cite_13 @cite_12
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Instance-level object segmentation is an important yet under-explored task. Most of state-of-the-art methods rely on region proposal methods to extract candidate segments and then utilize object classification to produce final results. Nonetheless, generating reliable region proposals itself is a quite challenging and unsolved task. In this work, we propose a Proposal-Free Network (PFN) to address the instance-level object segmentation problem, which outputs the numbers of instances of different categories and the pixel-level information on i) the coordinates of the instance bounding box each pixel belongs to, and ii) the confidences of different categories for each pixel, based on pixel-to-pixel deep convolutional neural network. All the outputs together, by using any off-the-shelf clustering method for simple post-processing, can naturally generate the ultimate instance-level object segmentation results. The whole PFN can be easily trained without the requirement of a proposal generation stage. Extensive evaluations on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 semantic segmentation benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PFN solution without relying on any proposal generation methods. We present a method for generating object segmentation proposals from groups of superpixels. The goal is to propose accurate segmentations for all objects of an image. The proposed object hypotheses can be used as input to object detection systems and thereby improve efficiency by replacing exhaustive search. The segmentations are generated in a class-independent manner and therefore the computational cost of the approach is independent of the number of object classes. Our approach combines both global and local search in the space of sets of superpixels. The local search is implemented by greedily merging adjacent pairs of superpixels to build a bottom-up segmentation hierarchy. The regions from such a hierarchy directly provide a part of our region proposals. The global search provides the other part by performing a set of graph cut segmentations on a superpixel graph obtained from an intermediate level of the hierarchy. The parameters of the graph cut problems are learnt in such a manner that they provide complementary sets of regions. Experiments with Pascal VOC images show that we reach state-of-the-art with greatly reduced computational cost. We present a novel framework to generate and rank plausible hypotheses for the spatial extent of objects in images using bottom-up computational processes and mid-level selection cues. The object hypotheses are represented as figure-ground segmentations, and are extracted automatically, without prior knowledge of the properties of individual object classes, by solving a sequence of Constrained Parametric Min-Cut problems (CPMC) on a regular image grid. In a subsequent step, we learn to rank the corresponding segments by training a continuous model to predict how likely they are to exhibit real-world regularities (expressed as putative overlap with ground truth) based on their mid-level region properties, then diversify the estimated overlap score using maximum marginal relevance measures. We show that this algorithm significantly outperforms the state of the art for low-level segmentation in the VOC 2009 and 2010 data sets. In our companion papers [1], [2], we show that the algorithm can be used, successfully, in a segmentation-based visual object category recognition pipeline. This architecture ranked first in the VOC2009 and VOC2010 image segmentation and labeling challenges. Existing transition region-based image thresholding methods are unstable, and fail to achieve satisfactory segmentation accuracy on images with overlapping gray levels between object and background. This is because?they only take the gray level mean of pixels in transition regions as the segmentation threshold of the whole image. To alleviate this issue, we proposed a robust hybrid single-object image segmentation method by exploiting salient transition region. Specifically, the proposed method first uses local complexity and local variance to identify transition regions of an image. Secondly, the transition region with the largest pixel number is chosen as salient transition region. Thirdly, a gray level interval is determined by using transition regions and image information, and one gray level of the interval is determined as the segmentation threshold by using the salient transition region. Finally, the image thresholding result is refined as final segmentation result by using the salient transition region to remove fake object regions. The proposed method has been extensively evaluated by experiments on 170 single-object real world images. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better segmentation accuracy and robustness than several types of image segmentation techniques, and enjoys its nature of simplicity and efficiency. We propose a robust salient transition region-based image segmentation method.It adequately uses transition region for image segmentation from a new viewpoint.It alleviates the limitations of transition region-based image thresholding.It significantly improves accuracy and robustness of image segmentation.It keeps the nature of image thresholding, easy operation and high efficiency.