In this paper we propose a CNN architecture for semantic image segmentation. We introduce a new 'bilateral inception' module that can be inserted in existing CNN architectures and performs bilateral filtering, at multiple feature-scales, between superpixels in an image. The feature spaces for bilateral filtering and other parameters of the module are learned end-to-end using standard backpropagation techniques. The bilateral inception module addresses two issues that arise with general CNN segmentation architectures. First, this module propagates information between (super) pixels while respecting image edges, thus using the structured information of the problem for improved results. Second, the layer recovers a full resolution segmentation result from the lower resolution solution of a CNN. In the experiments, we modify several existing CNN architectures by inserting our inception module between the last CNN (1x1 convolution) layers. Empirical results on three different datasets show reliable improvements not only in comparison to the baseline networks, but also in comparison to several dense-pixel prediction techniques such as CRFs, while being competitive in time.
A contribution of this work is to define convolutions over superpixels by defining connectivity among them. @cite_41 , a method to use superpixels inside CNNs has been proposed by re-arranging superpixels based on their features. The technique proposed here is more generic and alleviates the need for rearranging superpixels. A method to filter irregularly sampled data has been developed in @cite_43 which may be applicable to superpixel convolutions. The difference being that their method requires a pre-defined graph structure for every example image separately while our approach directly works on superpixels. We experimented with Isomap embeddings @cite_10 of superpixels but for speed reasons opted for the more efficient kernels presented in this paper. The work of @cite_37 extracted multi-scale features at each superpixel and perform semantic segmentation by classifying each superpixel independently. In contrast, we propagate information across superpixels by using bilateral filters with learned feature spaces.
@cite_41 @cite_43 @cite_37 @cite_10
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In this paper, we present an efficient page segmentation method for historical document images. Many existing methods either rely on hand-crafted features or perform rather slow as they treat the problem as a pixel-level assignment problem. In order to create a feasible method for real applications, we propose to use superpixels as basic units of segmentation, and features are learned directly from pixels. An image is first oversegmented into superpixels with the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) algorithm. Then, each superpixel is represented by the features of its central pixel. The features are learned from pixel intensity values with stacked convolutional autoencoders in an unsupervised manner. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier is used to classify superpixels into four classes: periphery, background, text block, and decoration. Finally, the segmentation results are refined by a connected component based smoothing procedure. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that compared to our previous method, the proposed method is much faster and achieves comparable segmentation results. Additionally, much fewer pixels are used for classifier training. In this paper, we propose a real-time image superpixel segmentation method with 50 frames s by using the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm. In order to decrease the computational costs of superpixel algorithms, we adopt a fast two-step framework. In the first clustering stage, the DBSCAN algorithm with color-similarity and geometric restrictions is used to rapidly cluster the pixels, and then, small clusters are merged into superpixels by their neighborhood through a distance measurement defined by color and spatial features in the second merging stage. A robust and simple distance function is defined for obtaining better superpixels in these two steps. The experimental results demonstrate that our real-time superpixel algorithm (50 frames s) by the DBSCAN clustering outperforms the state-of-the-art superpixel segmentation methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Grouping cues can affect the performance of segmentation greatly. In this paper, we show that superpixels (image segments) can provide powerful grouping cues to guide segmentation, where superpixels can be collected easily by (over)-segmenting the image using any reasonable existing segmentation algorithms. Generated by different algorithms with varying parameters, superpixels can capture diverse and multi-scale visual patterns of a natural image. Successful integration of the cues from a large multitude of superpixels presents a promising yet not fully explored direction. In this paper, we propose a novel segmentation framework based on bipartite graph partitioning, which is able to aggregate multi-layer superpixels in a principled and very effective manner. Computationally, it is tailored to unbalanced bipartite graph structure and leads to a highly efficient, linear-time spectral algorithm. Our method achieves significantly better performance on the Berkeley Segmentation Database compared to state-of-the-art techniques. In diffusion-based saliency detection, an image is partitioned into superpixels and mapped to a graph, with superpixels as nodes and edge strengths proportional to superpixel similarity. Saliency information is then propagated over the graph using a diffusion process, whose equilibrium state yields the object saliency map. The optimal solution is the product of a propagation matrix and a saliency seed vector that contains a prior saliency assessment. This is obtained from either a bottom-up saliency detector or some heuristics. In this work, we propose a method to learn optimal seeds for object saliency. Two types of features are computed per superpixel: the bottom-up saliency of the superpixel region and a set of mid-level vision features informative of how likely the superpixel is to belong to an object. The combination of features that best discriminates between object and background saliency is then learned, using a large-margin formulation of the discriminant saliency principle. The propagation of the resulting saliency seeds, using a diffusion process, is finally shown to outperform the state of the art on a number of salient object detection datasets. We present a novel image superpixel segmentation approach using the proposed lazy random walk (LRW) algorithm in this paper. Our method begins with initializing the seed positions and runs the LRW algorithm on the input image to obtain the probabilities of each pixel. Then, the boundaries of initial superpixels are obtained according to the probabilities and the commute time. The initial superpixels are iteratively optimized by the new energy function, which is defined on the commute time and the texture measurement. Our LRW algorithm with self-loops has the merits of segmenting the weak boundaries and complicated texture regions very well by the new global probability maps and the commute time strategy. The performance of superpixel is improved by relocating the center positions of superpixels and dividing the large superpixels into small ones with the proposed optimization algorithm. The experimental results have demonstrated that our method achieves better performance than previous superpixel approaches. Superpixel algorithms aim to over-segment the image by grouping pixels that belong to the same object. Many state-of-the-art superpixel algorithms rely on minimizing objective functions to enforce color homogeneity. The optimization is accomplished by sophisticated methods that progressively build the superpixels, typically by adding cuts or growing superpixels. As a result, they are computationally too expensive for real-time applications. We introduce a new approach based on a simple hill-climbing optimization. Starting from an initial superpixel partitioning, it continuously refines the superpixels by modifying the boundaries. We define a robust and fast to evaluate energy function, based on enforcing color similarity between the boundaries and the superpixel color histogram. In a series of experiments, we show that we achieve an excellent compromise between accuracy and efficiency. We are able to achieve a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art, but in real-time on a single Intel i7 CPU at 2.8GHz. We propose a method to identify and localize object classes in images. Instead of operating at the pixel level, we advocate the use of superpixels as the basic unit of a class segmentation or pixel localization scheme. To this end, we construct a classifier on the histogram of local features found in each superpixel. We regularize this classifier by aggregating histograms in the neighborhood of each superpixel and then refine our results further by using the classifier in a conditional random field operating on the superpixel graph. Our proposed method exceeds the previously published state-of-the-art on two challenging datasets: Graz-02 and the PASCAL VOC 2007 Segmentation Challenge. In this paper, we present a color transfer algorithm to colorize a broad range of gray images without any user intervention. The algorithm uses a machine learning-based approach to automatically colorize grayscale images. The algorithm uses the superpixel representation of the reference color images to learn the relationship between different image features and their corresponding color values. We use this learned information to predict the color value of each grayscale image superpixel. As compared to processing individual image pixels, our use of superpixels helps us to achieve a much higher degree of spatial consistency as well as speeds up the colorization process. The predicted color values of the gray-scale image superpixels are used to provide a 'micro-scribble' at the centroid of the superpixels. These color scribbles are refined by using a voting based approach. To generate the final colorization result, we use an optimization-based approach to smoothly spread the color scribble across all pixels within a superpixel. Experimental results on a broad range of images and the comparison with existing state-of-the-art colorization methods demonstrate the greater effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. This paper proposes a superpixel-based spatiotemporal saliency model for saliency detection in videos. Based on the superpixel representation of video frames, motion histograms and color histograms are extracted at the superpixel level as local features and frame level as global features. Then, superpixel-level temporal saliency is measured by integrating motion distinctiveness of superpixels with a scheme of temporal saliency prediction and adjustment, and superpixel-level spatial saliency is measured by evaluating global contrast and spatial sparsity of superpixels. Finally, a pixel-level saliency derivation method is used to generate pixel-level temporal and spatial saliency maps, and an adaptive fusion method is exploited to integrate them into the spatiotemporal saliency map. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms six state-of-the-art spatiotemporal saliency models in terms of both saliency detection and human fixation prediction. Computer vision applications have come to rely increasingly on superpixels in recent years, but it is not always clear what constitutes a good superpixel algorithm. In an effort to understand the benefits and drawbacks of existing methods, we empirically compare five state-of-the-art superpixel algorithms for their ability to adhere to image boundaries, speed, memory efficiency, and their impact on segmentation performance. We then introduce a new superpixel algorithm, simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC), which adapts a k-means clustering approach to efficiently generate superpixels. Despite its simplicity, SLIC adheres to boundaries as well as or better than previous methods. At the same time, it is faster and more memory efficient, improves segmentation performance, and is straightforward to extend to supervoxel generation. 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. With the advances of depth sensing technologies, color image plus depth information (referred to as RGB-D data hereafter) is more and more popular for comprehensive description of 3-D scenes. This paper proposes a two-stage segmentation method for RGB-D data: 1) oversegmentation by 3-D geometry enhanced superpixels and 2) graph-based merging with label cost from superpixels. In the oversegmentation stage, 3-D geometrical information is reconstructed from the depth map. Then, a K-means-like clustering method is applied to the RGB-D data for oversegmentation using an 8-D distance metric constructed from both color and 3-D geometrical information. In the merging stage, treating each superpixel as a node, a graph-based model is set up to relabel the superpixels into semantically-coherent segments. In the graph-based model, RGB-D proximity, texture similarity, and boundary continuity are incorporated into the smoothness term to exploit the correlations of neighboring superpixels. To obtain a compact labeling, the label term is designed to penalize labels linking to similar superpixels that likely belong to the same object. Both the proposed 3-D geometry enhanced superpixel clustering method and the graph-based merging method from superpixels are evaluated by qualitative and quantitative results. By the fusion of color and depth information, the proposed method achieves superior segmentation performance over several state-of-the-art algorithms. We introduce a purely feed-forward architecture for semantic segmentation. We map small image elements (superpixels) to rich feature representations extracted from a sequence of nested regions of increasing extent. These regions are obtained by "zooming out" from the superpixel all the way to scene-level resolution. This approach exploits statistical structure in the image and in the label space without setting up explicit structured prediction mechanisms, and thus avoids complex and expensive inference. Instead superpixels are classified by a feedforward multilayer network. Our architecture achieves new state of the art performance in semantic segmentation, obtaining 64.4 average accuracy on the PASCAL VOC 2012 test set. This paper presents an efficient algorithm for interactive image segmentation that responds to 1-bit user feedback. The goal of this type of segmentation is to propose a sequence of yes-or-no questions to the user. Then, according to the 1-bit answers from the user, the segmentation algorithm progressively revises the questions and the segments, so that the segmentation result can approach the ideal region of interest (ROI) in the mind of the user. We define a question as an event that whether a chosen superpixel hits the ROI or not. In general, an interactive image segmentation algorithm is better to achieve high segmentation accuracy, low response time, and simple manipulation. We fulfill these demands by designing an efficient interactive segmentation algorithm from 1-bit user feedback. Our algorithm employs techniques from over-segmentation, entropy calculation, and transductive inference. Over-segmentation reduces the solution set of questions and the computational costs of transductive inference. Entropy calculation provides a way to characterize the query order of superpixels. Transductive inference is used to estimate the similarity between superpixels and to partition the superpixels into ROI and region of uninterest (ROU). Following the clues from the similarity between superpixels, we design the query-superpixel selection mechanism for human-machine interaction. Our key idea is to narrow down the solution set of questions, and then to propose the most informative question based on the clues of the similarities among the superpixels. We assess our method on four publicly available datasets. The experiments demonstrate that our method provides a plausible solution to the problem of interactive image segmentation with merely 1-bit user feedback. We introduce a purely feed-forward architecture for semantic segmentation. We map small image elements (superpixels) to rich feature representations extracted from a sequence of nested regions of increasing extent. These regions are obtained by “zooming out” from the superpixel all the way to scene-level resolution. This approach exploits statistical structure in the image and in the label space without setting up explicit structured prediction mechanisms, and thus avoids complex and expensive inference. Instead superpixels are classified by a feedforward multilayer network. Our architecture achieves 69.6 average accuracy on the PASCAL VOC 2012 test set. We present a fast approximate nearest neighbor algorithm for semantic segmentation. Our algorithm builds a graph over superpixels from an annotated set of training images. Edges in the graph represent approximate nearest neighbors in feature space. At test time we match superpixels from a novel image to the training images by adding the novel image to the graph. A move-making search algorithm allows us to leverage the graph and image structure for finding matches. We then transfer labels from the training images to the image under test. To promote good matches between superpixels we propose to learn a distance metric that weights the edges in our graph. Our approach is evaluated on four standard semantic segmentation datasets and achieves results comparable with the state-of-the-art. Cloud detection is one of the important tasks for remote sensing image processing. In this paper, a novel multilevel cloud detection method based on deep learning is proposed for remote sensing images. First, the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) method is improved to segment the image into good quality superpixels. Then, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with two branches is designed to extract the multiscale features from each superpixel and predict the superpixel as one of three classes including thick cloud, thin cloud, and noncloud. Finally, the predictions of all the superpixels in the image yield the cloud detection result. In the proposed cloud detection framework, the improved SLIC method can obtain accurate cloud boundaries by optimizing initial cluster centers, designing dynamic distance measure, and expanding search space. Moreover, different from traditional cloud detection methods that cannot achieve multilevel detection of cloud, the designed deep CNN model can not only detect cloud but also distinguish thin cloud from thick cloud. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can detect cloud with higher accuracy and robustness than compared methods. In this paper, we present a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model to deal with the problem of segmenting handwritten historical document images into different regions. We consider page segmentation as a pixel-labeling problem, i.e., each pixel is assigned to one of a set of labels. Features are learned from pixel intensity values with stacked convolutional autoencoders in an unsupervised manner. The features are used for the purpose of initial classification with a multilayer perceptron. Then a CRF model is introduced for modeling the local and contextual information jointly in order to improve the segmentation. For the purpose of decreasing the time complexity, we perform labeling at superpixel level. In the CRF model, graph nodes are represented by superpixels. The label of each pixel is determined by the label of the superpixel to which it belongs. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that, compared to previous methods, the proposed method achieves more accurate segmentation results and is much faster. To facilitate efficiency, most recent successful saliency detection methods are built on superpixel level. However, saliency detection with single-scale superpixel segmentation may fail in capturing the intrinsic salient objects in complex natural scenes with small-scale high-contrast backgrounds. To tackle this problem and realize more reliable saliency detection, we present a simple strategy using multiscale superpixels to jointly detect salient object via low-rank analysis. Specifically, we construct a multiscale superpixel pyramid and derive the corresponding saliency map using multiple saliency features and priors for each single scale at first. Then, we show that by joint low-rank analysis of multiscale saliency maps, we can obtain a more reliable adaptively fused saliency map that takes all scales saliency results into account. We further propose a GMM-based co-saliency prior to enable the above approach to detecting co-salient objects from multiple images. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods. Image co-saliency detection is a valuable technique to highlight perceptually salient regions in image pairs. In this paper, we propose a self-contained co-saliency detection algorithm based on superpixel affinity matrix. We first compute both intra and inter similarities of superpixels of image pairs. Bipartite graph matching is applied to determine most reliable inter similarities. To update the similarity score between every two superpixels, we next employ a GPU-based all-pair SimRank algorithm to do propagation on the affinity matrix. Based on the inter superpixel affinities we derive a co-saliency measure that evaluates the foreground cohesiveness and locality compactness of superpixels within one image. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in experimental evaluation.