In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method for fast image segmentation. We re-examine the locality-preserving character of spectral clustering by constructing a graph over image regions with both global and local connections. Our novel approach to build graph connections relies on two key observations: 1) local region pairs that co-occur frequently will have a high probability to reside on a common object; 2) spatially distant regions in a common object often exhibit similar visual saliency, which implies their neighborship in a manifold. We present a novel energy function to efficiently conduct graph partitioning. Based on multiple high quality partitions, we show that the generated eigenvector histogram based representation can automatically drive effective unary potentials for a hierarchical random field model to produce multi-class segmentation. Sufficient experiments, on the BSDS500 benchmark, large-scale PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets, demonstrate the competitive segmentation accuracy and significantly improved efficiency of our proposed method compared with other state of the arts.
Image segmentation has been studied in the computer vision community for decades. Shi @cite_37 propose normalized cuts (NCut), which advanced spectral clustering based image region segmentation. @cite_20 enables its multi-class segmentation. Among the region based segmentation, diffusion based approaches @cite_3 @cite_57 , GraphCut @cite_0 , GrabCut @cite_0 , etc @cite_39 @cite_30 @cite_33 @cite_60 , have been explored to partition images. Building successful affinity matrices is critical @cite_58 . Many subsequent approaches have computed more effective affinity matrices using elaborately designed low-level features and metrics @cite_52 @cite_24 @cite_14 @cite_9 . To solve the limitation of NCut to capture affinities of distant pixels, several methods @cite_35 @cite_56 @cite_9 @cite_55 have been proposed base on multi-scaling affinity strategies. However, dense affinity suffers from optimization bottleneck, although approximation algorithms are explored @cite_24 @cite_56 @cite_6 . Our method is able to capture both local and global affinities as well keeps the sparsity of the affinity matrix.
@cite_30 @cite_35 @cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_33 @cite_60 @cite_9 @cite_55 @cite_52 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_57 @cite_0 @cite_24 @cite_56 @cite_6 @cite_58 @cite_20
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In this paper, we present a superpixel segmentation algorithm called linear spectral clustering (LSC), which is capable of producing superpixels with both high boundary adherence and visual compactness for natural images with low computational costs. In LSC, a normalized cuts-based formulation of image segmentation is adopted using a distance metric that measures both the color similarity and the space proximity between image pixels. However, rather than directly using the traditional eigen-based algorithm, we approximate the similarity metric through a deliberately designed kernel function such that pixel values can be explicitly mapped to a high-dimensional feature space. We then apply the conclusion that by appropriately weighting each point in this feature space, the objective functions of the weighted K-means and the normalized cuts share the same optimum points. Consequently, it is possible to optimize the cost function of the normalized cuts by iteratively applying simple K-means clustering in the proposed feature space. LSC possesses linear computational complexity and high memory efficiency, since it avoids both the decomposition of the affinity matrix and the generation of the large kernel matrix. By utilizing the underlying mathematical equivalence between the two types of seemingly different methods, LSC successfully preserves global image structures through efficient local operations. Experimental results show that LSC performs as well as or even better than the state-of-the-art superpixel segmentation algorithms in terms of several commonly used evaluation metrics in image segmentation. The applicability of LSC is further demonstrated in two related computer vision tasks. The deficiency of segmentation labels is one of the main obstacles to semantic segmentation in the wild. To alleviate this issue, we present a novel framework that generates segmentation labels of images given their image-level class labels. In this weakly supervised setting, trained models have been known to segment local discriminative parts rather than the entire object area. Our solution is to propagate such local responses to nearby areas which belong to the same semantic entity. To this end, we propose a Deep Neural Network (DNN) called AffinityNet that predicts semantic affinity between a pair of adjacent image coordinates. The semantic propagation is then realized by random walk with the affinities predicted by AffinityNet. More importantly, the supervision employed to train AffinityNet is given by the initial discriminative part segmentation, which is incomplete as a segmentation annotation but sufficient for learning semantic affinities within small image areas. Thus the entire framework relies only on image-level class labels and does not require any extra data or annotations. On the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, a DNN learned with segmentation labels generated by our method outperforms previous models trained with the same level of supervision, and is even as competitive as those relying on stronger supervision. Motion segmentation is an important task for intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, inspired by the fact that a feature point trajectory can be sparsely represented as a combination of several feature point trajectories that share coherent transformations, an efficient and effective motion segmentation method with a sparsity constraint is proposed. Specifically, we first propose an accumulated scheme to efficiently integrate motion information from all the frames of a video sequence to construct a correlation matrix. Then, a sparse affinity matrix is built on the correlation matrix by using information-theoretic principles, where the nonzero elements in the same row of the sparse affinity matrix correspond to the feature point trajectories more likely belonging to the same motion. Thereafter, a segment and merge procedure is proposed to effectively estimate the number of motions via the sparse affinity matrix. Finally, by applying spectral clustering on the sparse affinity matrix, different motions in the video sequence are accurately segmented based on the estimated number of motions. Experimental results on the Hopkins 155 and the 62-clip datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods. Existing salient object detection models favor over-segmented regions upon which saliency is computed. Such local regions are less effective on representing object holistically and degrade emphasis of entire salient objects. As a result, the existing methods often fail to highlight an entire object in complex background. Toward better grouping of objects and background, in this paper, we consider graph cut, more specifically, the normalized graph cut (Ncut) for saliency detection. Since the Ncut partitions a graph in a normalized energy minimization fashion, resulting eigenvectors of the Ncut contain good cluster information that may group visual contents. Motivated by this, we directly induce saliency maps via eigenvectors of the Ncut, contributing to accurate saliency estimation of visual clusters. We implement the Ncut on a graph derived from a moderate number of superpixels. This graph captures both intrinsic color and edge information of image data. Starting from the superpixels, an adaptive multi-level region merging scheme is employed to seek such cluster information from Ncut eigenvectors. With developed saliency measures for each merged region, encouraging performance is obtained after across-level integration. Experiments by comparing with 13 existing methods on four benchmark datasets, including MSRA-1000, SOD, SED, and CSSD show the proposed method, Ncut saliency, results in uniform object enhancement and achieves comparable better performance to the state-of-the-art methods.