We propose a mid-level image segmentation framework that combines multiple figure-ground hypothesis (FG) constrained at different locations and scales, into interpretations that tile the entire image. The problem is cast as optimization over sets of maximal cliques sampled from the graph connecting non-overlapping, putative figure-ground segment hypotheses. Potential functions over cliques combine unary Gestalt-based figure quality scores and pairwise compatibilities among spatially neighboring segments, constrained by T-junctions and the boundary interface statistics resulting from projections of real 3d scenes. Learning the model parameters is formulated as rank optimization, alternating between sampling image tilings and optimizing their potential function parameters. State of the art results are reported on both the Berkeley and the VOC2009 segmentation dataset, where a 28 improvement was achieved.
While multi-part image segmentation algorithms are most commonly used, a number of figure-ground methods have been recently pursued. @cite_20 proposed an algorithm that generates figure-ground segmentations by maximizing a self-similarity criterion around a user selected image point. Malisiewicz and Efros @cite_4 showed that good object-level segments could be obtained by merging pairs and triplets of segments from multi-part segmentations, but at the expense of generating also a large quantity of implausible ones. Carreira and Sminchisescu @cite_17 generate a compact set of segments using parametric minimum cuts and learn to score them using region and Gestalt-based features. These algorithms were shown to be quite successful in extracting full object segments, suggesting that a promising research direction is to develop methods that combine multiple figure-ground segmentations (or just segments obtained at multiple scales, potentially from different methods), into plausible full image segmentations. Still missing is a formal multiple hypothesis computational framework for consistent selection (tiling) and learning, which we pursue here. Providing a compact set of multiple hypotheses rather than a single answer is desirable for learning, for high-level, informed processing and for graceful performance degradation.
@cite_4 @cite_20 @cite_17
2046382188 2017691720 2464606141 2138682569
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. We present a novel framework for generating and ranking plausible objects hypotheses in an image using bottom-up processes and mid-level cues. The object hypotheses are represented as figure-ground segmentations, and are extracted automatically, without prior knowledge about properties of individual object classes, by solving a sequence of constrained parametric min-cut problems (CPMC) on a regular image grid. We then learn to rank the object hypotheses by training a continuous model to predict how plausible the segments are, given their mid-level region properties. We show that this algorithm significantly outperforms the state of the art for low-level segmentation in the VOC09 segmentation dataset. It achieves the same average best segmentation covering as the best performing technique to date [2], 0.61 when using just the top 7 ranked segments, instead of the full hierarchy in [2]. Our method achieves 0.78 average best covering using 154 segments. In a companion paper [18], we also show that the algorithm achieves state-of-the art results when used in a segmentation-based recognition pipeline. We propose a new technique to jointly recover cosegmentation and dense per-pixel correspondence in two images. Our method parameterizes the correspondence field using piecewise similarity transformations and recovers a mapping between the estimated common "foreground" regions in the two images allowing them to be precisely aligned. Our formulation is based on a hierarchical Markov random field model with segmentation and transformation labels. The hierarchical structure uses nested image regions to constrain inference across multiple scales. Unlike prior hierarchical methods which assume that the structure is given, our proposed iterative technique dynamically recovers the structure along with the labeling. This joint inference is performed in an energy minimization framework using iterated graph cuts. We evaluate our method on a new dataset of 400 image pairs with manually obtained ground truth, where it outperforms state-of-the-art methods designed specifically for either cosegmentation or correspondence estimation. We propose an unsupervised video segmentation approach by simultaneously tracking multiple holistic figure-ground segments. Segment tracks are initialized from a pool of segment proposals generated from a figure-ground segmentation algorithm. Then, online non-local appearance models are trained incrementally for each track using a multi-output regularized least squares formulation. By using the same set of training examples for all segment tracks, a computational trick allows us to track hundreds of segment tracks efficiently, as well as perform optimal online updates in closed-form. Besides, a new composite statistical inference approach is proposed for refining the obtained segment tracks, which breaks down the initial segment proposals and recombines for better ones by utilizing high-order statistic estimates from the appearance model and enforcing temporal consistency. For evaluating the algorithm, a dataset, SegTrack v2, is collected with about 1,000 frames with pixel-level annotations. The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the dataset, showing its efficiency and robustness to challenges in different video sequences.