We present an approach for object segmentation in videos that combines frame-level object detection with concepts from object tracking and motion segmentation. The approach extracts temporally consistent object tubes based on an off-the-shelf detector. Besides the class label for each tube, this provides a location prior that is independent of motion. For the final video segmentation, we combine this information with motion cues. The method overcomes the typical problems of weakly supervised unsupervised video segmentation, such as scenes with no motion, dominant camera motion, and objects that move as a unit. In contrast to most tracking methods, it provides an accurate, temporally consistent segmentation of each object. We report results on four video segmentation datasets: YouTube Objects, SegTrackv2, egoMotion, and FBMS.
In Zhang al @cite_31 , frame-by-frame detections and segmentation proposals are combined to a temporally consistent semantic segmentation. The combination of a detector and a video segmentation approach is similar in spirit to our work, but technically, the approach is very different. We directly compare to Zhang al on the YouTube dataset. Also in the recent work of Seguin al @cite_26 , object tracking (either manual or via detection) guides a multiple instance segmentation. However, they do not make use of motion information, thus ignoring a powerful bottom-up cue in videos.
@cite_31 @cite_26
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We present an approach for object segmentation in videos that combines frame-level object detection with concepts from object tracking and motion segmentation. The approach extracts temporally consistent object tubes based on an off-the-shelf detector. Besides the class label for each tube, this provides a location prior that is independent of motion. For the final video segmentation, we combine this information with motion cues. The method overcomes the typical problems of weakly supervised unsupervised video segmentation, such as scenes with no motion, dominant camera motion, and objects that move as a unit. In contrast to most tracking methods, it provides an accurate, temporally consistent segmentation of each object. We report results on four video segmentation datasets: YouTube Objects, SegTrackv2, egoMotion, and FBMS. We segment moving objects in videos by ranking spatio-temporal segment proposals according to "moving objectness": how likely they are to contain a moving object. In each video frame, we compute segment proposals using multiple figure-ground segmentations on per frame motion boundaries. We rank them with a Moving Objectness Detector trained on image and motion fields to detect moving objects and discard over under segmentations or background parts of the scene. We extend the top ranked segments into spatio-temporal tubes using random walkers on motion affinities of dense point trajectories. Our final tube ranking consistently outperforms previous segmentation methods in the two largest video segmentation benchmarks currently available, for any number of proposals. Further, our per frame moving object proposals increase the detection rate up to 7 over previous state-of-the-art static proposal methods. We segment moving objects in videos by ranking spatio-temporal segment proposals according to “moving objectness”; how likely they are to contain a moving object. In each video frame, we compute segment proposals using multiple figure-ground segmentations on per frame motion boundaries. We rank them with a Moving Objectness Detector trained on image and motion fields to detect moving objects and discard over under segmentations or background parts of the scene. We extend the top ranked segments into spatio-temporal tubes using random walkers on motion affinities of dense point trajectories. Our final tube ranking consistently outperforms previous segmentation methods in the two largest video segmentation benchmarks currently available, for any number of proposals. Further, our per frame moving object proposals increase the detection rate up to 7 over previous state-of-the-art static proposal methods. Inspired by recent advances of deep learning in instance segmentation and object tracking, we introduce video object segmentation problem as a concept of guided instance segmentation. Our model proceeds on a per-frame basis, guided by the output of the previous frame towards the object of interest in the next frame. We demonstrate that highly accurate object segmentation in videos can be enabled by using a convnet trained with static images only. The key ingredient of our approach is a combination of offline and online learning strategies, where the former serves to produce a refined mask from the previous frame estimate and the latter allows to capture the appearance of the specific object instance. Our method can handle different types of input annotations: bounding boxes and segments, as well as incorporate multiple annotated frames, making the system suitable for diverse applications. We obtain competitive results on three different datasets, independently from the type of input annotation. Semantic object segmentation in video is an important step for large-scale multimedia analysis. In many cases, however, semantic objects are only tagged at video-level, making them difficult to be located and segmented. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach to segment semantic objects in weakly labeled video via object detection. In our approach, a novel video segmentation-by-detection framework is proposed, which first incorporates object and region detectors pre-trained on still images to generate a set of detection and segmentation proposals. Based on the noisy proposals, several object tracks are then initialized by solving a joint binary optimization problem with min-cost flow. As such tracks actually provide rough configurations of semantic objects, we thus refine the object segmentation while preserving the spatiotemporal consistency by inferring the shape likelihoods of pixels from the statistical information of tracks. Experimental results on Youtube-Objects dataset and SegTrack v2 dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-arts and shows impressive results. We present a spatio-temporal energy minimization formulation for simultaneous video object discovery and co-segmentation across multiple videos containing irrelevant frames. Our approach overcomes a limitation that most existing video co-segmentation methods possess, i.e., they perform poorly when dealing with practical videos in which the target objects are not present in many frames. Our formulation incorporates a spatio-temporal auto-context model, which is combined with appearance modeling for superpixel labeling. The superpixel-level labels are propagated to the frame level through a multiple instance boosting algorithm with spatial reasoning, based on which frames containing the target object are identified. Our method only needs to be bootstrapped with the frame-level labels for a few video frames (e.g., usually 1 to 3) to indicate if they contain the target objects or not. Extensive experiments on four datasets validate the efficacy of our proposed method: 1) object segmentation from a single video on the SegTrack dataset, 2) object co-segmentation from multiple videos on a video co-segmentation dataset, and 3) joint object discovery and co-segmentation from multiple videos containing irrelevant frames on the MOViCS dataset and XJTU-Stevens, a new dataset that we introduce in this paper. The proposed method compares favorably with the state-of-the-art in all of these experiments. Due to its importance, video segmentation has regained interest recently. However, there is no common agreement about the necessary ingredients for best performance. This work contributes a thorough analysis of various within- and between-frame affinities suitable for video segmentation. Our results show that a frame-based superpixel segmentation combined with a few motion and appearance-based affinities are sufficient to obtain good video segmentation performance. A second contribution of the paper is the extension of [1] to include motion-cues, which makes the algorithm globally aware of motion, thus improving its performance for video sequences. Finally, we contribute an extension of an established image segmentation benchmark [1] to videos, allowing coarse-to-fine video segmentations and multiple human annotations. Our results are tested on BMDS [2], and compared to existing methods. Video Object Segmentation, and video processing in general, has been historically dominated by methods that rely on the temporal consistency and redundancy in consecutive video frames. When the temporal smoothness is suddenly broken, such as when an object is occluded, or some frames are missing in a sequence, the result of these methods can deteriorate significantly or they may not even produce any result at all. This paper explores the orthogonal approach of processing each frame independently, i.e disregarding the temporal information. In particular, it tackles the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation: the separation of an object from the background in a video, given its mask in the first frame. We present Semantic One-Shot Video Object Segmentation (OSVOS-S), based on a fully-convolutional neural network architecture that is able to successively transfer generic semantic information, learned on ImageNet, to the task of foreground segmentation, and finally to learning the appearance of a single annotated object of the test sequence (hence one shot). We show that instance level semantic information, when combined effectively, can dramatically improve the results of our previous method, OSVOS. We perform experiments on two recent video segmentation databases, which show that OSVOS-S is both the fastest and most accurate method in the state of the art. Video Object Segmentation, and video processing in general, has been historically dominated by methods that rely on the temporal consistency and redundancy in consecutive video frames. When the temporal smoothness is suddenly broken, such as when an object is occluded, or some frames are missing in a sequence, the result of these methods can deteriorate significantly. This paper explores the orthogonal approach of processing each frame independently, i.e., disregarding the temporal information. In particular, it tackles the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation: the separation of an object from the background in a video, given its mask in the first frame. We present Semantic One-Shot Video Object Segmentation (OSVOS @math S), based on a fully-convolutional neural network architecture that is able to successively transfer generic semantic information, learned on ImageNet, to the task of foreground segmentation, and finally to learning the appearance of a single annotated object of the test sequence (hence one shot). We show that instance-level semantic information, when combined effectively, can dramatically improve the results of our previous method, OSVOS. We perform experiments on two recent single-object video segmentation databases, which show that OSVOS @math S is both the fastest and most accurate method in the state of the art. Experiments on multi-object video segmentation show that OSVOS @math S obtains competitive results. Abstract Interpretation of ultrasound videos of the fet al heart is crucial for the antenatal diagnosis of congenital heart disease (CHD). We believe that automated image analysis techniques could make an important contribution towards improving CHD detection rates. However, to our knowledge, no previous work has been done in this area. With this goal in mind, this paper presents a framework for tracking the key variables that describe the content of each frame of freehand 2D ultrasound scanning videos of the healthy fet al heart. This represents an important first step towards developing tools that can assist with CHD detection in abnormal cases. We argue that it is natural to approach this as a sequential Bayesian filtering problem, due to the strong prior model we have of the underlying anatomy, and the ambiguity of the appearance of structures in ultrasound images. We train classification and regression forests to predict the visibility, location and orientation of the fet al heart in the image, and the viewing plane label from each frame. We also develop a novel adaptation of regression forests for circular variables to deal with the prediction of cardiac phase. Using a particle-filtering-based method to combine predictions from multiple video frames, we demonstrate how to filter this information to give a temporally consistent output at real-time speeds. We present results on a challenging dataset gathered in a real-world clinical setting and compare to expert annotations, achieving similar levels of accuracy to the levels of inter- and intra-observer variation. One major technique debt in video object segmentation is to label the object masks for training instances. As a result, we propose to prepare inexpensive, yet high quality pseudo ground truth corrected with motion cue for video object segmentation training. Our method conducts semantic segmentation using instance segmentation networks and, then, selects the segmented object of interest as the pseudo ground truth based on the motion information. Afterwards, the pseudo ground truth is exploited to finetune the pretrained objectness network to facilitate object segmentation in the remaining frames of the video. We show that the pseudo ground truth could effectively improve the segmentation performance. This straightforward unsupervised video object segmentation method is more efficient than existing methods. Experimental results on DAVIS and FBMS show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised segmentation methods on various benchmark datasets. And the category-agnostic pseudo ground truth has great potential to extend to multiple arbitrary object tracking. Video segmentation research is currently limited by the lack of a benchmark dataset that covers the large variety of sub problems appearing in video segmentation and that is large enough to avoid over fitting. Consequently, there is little analysis of video segmentation which generalizes across subtasks, and it is not yet clear which and how video segmentation should leverage the information from the still-frames, as previously studied in image segmentation, alongside video specific information, such as temporal volume, motion and occlusion. In this work we provide such an analysis based on annotations of a large video dataset, where each video is manually segmented by multiple persons. Moreover, we introduce a new volume-based metric that includes the important aspect of temporal consistency, that can deal with segmentation hierarchies, and that reflects the tradeoff between over-segmentation and segmentation accuracy. In this work, we propose a method for instance based human segmentation in images and videos, extending the recent detector-based conditional random field model of Ladicky et.al. Instance based human segmentation involves pixel level labeling of an image, partitioning it into distinct human instances and background. To achieve our goal, we add three new components to their framework. First, we include human partsbased detection potentials to take advantage of the structure present in human instances. Further, in order to generate a consistent segmentation from different human parts, we incorporate shape prior information, which biases the segmentation to characteristic overall human shapes. Also, we enhance the representative power of the energy function by adopting exemplar instance based matching terms, which helps our method to adapt easily to different human sizes and poses. Finally, we extensively evaluate our proposed method on the Buffy dataset with our new segmented ground truth images, and show a substantial improvement over existing CRF methods. These new annotations will be made available for future use as well. We propose a detection-free system for segmenting multiple interacting and deforming people in a video. People detectors often fail under close agent interaction, limiting the performance of detection based tracking methods. Motion information often fails to separate similarly moving agents or to group distinctly moving articulated body parts. We formulate video segmentation as graph partitioning in the trajectory domain. We classify trajectories as foreground or background based on trajectory saliencies, and use foreground trajectories as graph nodes. We incorporate object connectedness constraints into our trajectory weight matrix based on topology of foreground: we set repulsive weights between trajectories that belong to different connected components in any frame of their time intersection. Attractive weights are set between similarly moving trajectories. Information from foreground topology complements motion information and our spatiotemporal segments can be interpreted as connected moving entities rather than just trajectory groups of similar motion. All our cues are computed on trajectories and naturally encode large temporal context, which is crucial for resolving local in time ambiguities. We present results of our approach on challenging datasets outperforming by far the state of the art. Identifying handled objects, i.e. objects being manipulated by a user, is essential for recognizing the person's activities. An egocentric camera as worn on the body enjoys many advantages such as having a natural first-person view and not needing to instrument the environment. It is also a challenging setting, where background clutter is known to be a major source of problems and is difficult to handle with the camera constantly and arbitrarily moving. In this work we develop a bottom-up motion-based approach to robustly segment out foreground objects in egocentric video and show that it greatly improves object recognition accuracy. Our key insight is that egocentric video of object manipulation is a special domain and many domain-specific cues can readily help. We compute dense optical flow and fit it into multiple affine layers. We then use a max-margin classifier to combine motion with empirical knowledge of object location and background movement as well as temporal cues of support region and color appearance. We evaluate our segmentation algorithm on the large Intel Egocentric Object Recognition dataset with 42 objects and 100K frames. We show that, when combined with temporal integration, figure-ground segmentation improves the accuracy of a SIFT-based recognition system from 33 to 60 , and that of a latent-HOG system from 64 to 86 . We present a novel approach to video segmentation using multiple object proposals. The problem is formulated as a minimization of a novel energy function defined over a fully connected graph of object proposals. Our model combines appearance with long-range point tracks, which is key to ensure robustness with respect to fast motion and occlusions over longer video sequences. As opposed to previous approaches based on object proposals, we do not seek the best per-frame object hypotheses to perform the segmentation. Instead, we combine multiple, potentially imperfect proposals to improve overall segmentation accuracy and ensure robustness to outliers. Overall, the basic algorithm consists of three steps. First, we generate a very large number of object proposals for each video frame using existing techniques. Next, we perform an SVM-based pruning step to retain only high quality proposals with sufficiently discriminative power. Finally, we determine the fore-and background classification by solving for the maximum a posteriori of a fully connected conditional random field, defined using our novel energy function. Experimental results on a well established dataset demonstrate that our method compares favorably to several recent state-of-the-art approaches. We address the problem of segmenting multiple object instances in complex videos. Our method does not require manual pixel-level annotation for training, and relies instead on readily-available object detectors or visual object tracking only. Given object bounding boxes at input, we cast video segmentation as a weakly-supervised learning problem. Our proposed objective combines (a) a discriminative clustering term for background segmentation, (b) a spectral clustering one for grouping pixels of same object instances, and (c) linear constraints enabling instance-level segmentation. We propose a convex relaxation of this problem and solve it efficiently using the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. We report results and compare our method to several baselines on a new video dataset for multi-instance person segmentation. Our goal is to segment a video sequence into moving objects and the world scene. In recent work, spectral embedding of point trajectories based on 2D motion cues accumulated from their lifespans, has shown to outperform factorization and per frame segmentation methods for video segmentation. The scale and kinematic nature of the moving objects and the background scene determine how close or far apart trajectories are placed in the spectral embedding. Such density variations may confuse clustering algorithms, causing over-fragmentation of object interiors. Therefore, instead of clustering in the spectral embedding, we propose detecting discontinuities of embedding density between spatially neighboring trajectories. Detected discontinuities are strong indicators of object boundaries and thus valuable for video segmentation. We propose a novel embedding discretization process that recovers from over-fragmentations by merging clusters according to discontinuity evidence along inter-cluster boundaries. For segmenting articulated objects, we combine motion grouping cues with a center-surround saliency operation, resulting in “context-aware”, spatially coherent, saliency maps. Figure-ground segmentation obtained from saliency thresholding, provides object connectedness constraints that alter motion based trajectory affinities, by keeping articulated parts together and separating disconnected in time objects. Finally, we introduce Gabriel graphs as effective per frame superpixel maps for converting trajectory clustering to dense image segmentation. Gabriel edges bridge large contour gaps via geometric reasoning without over-segmenting coherent image regions. We present experimental results of our method that outperform the state-of-the-art in challenging motion segmentation datasets. Inspired by recent advances of deep learning in instance segmentation and object tracking, we introduce the concept of convnet-based guidance applied to video object segmentation. Our model proceeds on a per-frame basis, guided by the output of the previous frame towards the object of interest in the next frame. We demonstrate that highly accurate object segmentation in videos can be enabled by using a convolutional neural network (convnet) trained with static images only. The key component of our approach is a combination of offline and online learning strategies, where the former produces a refined mask from the previous frame estimate and the latter allows to capture the appearance of the specific object instance. Our method can handle different types of input annotations such as bounding boxes and segments while leveraging an arbitrary amount of annotated frames. Therefore our system is suitable for diverse applications with different requirements in terms of accuracy and efficiency. In our extensive evaluation, we obtain competitive results on three different datasets, independently from the type of input annotation. We present an unsupervised approach that generates a diverse, ranked set of bounding box and segmentation video object proposals—spatio-temporal tubes that localize the foreground objects—in an unannotated video. In contrast to previous unsupervised methods that either track regions initialized in an arbitrary frame or train a fixed model over a cluster of regions, we instead discover a set of easy-togroup instances of an object and then iteratively update its appearance model to gradually detect harder instances in temporally-adjacent frames. Our method first generates a set of spatio-temporal bounding box proposals, and then refines them to obtain pixel-wise segmentation proposals. We demonstrate state-of-the-art segmentation results on the SegTrack v2 dataset, and bounding box tracking results that perform competitively to state-of-the-art supervised tracking methods.