We propose a unified approach for bottom-up hierarchical image segmentation and object proposal generation for recognition, called Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping (MCG). For this purpose, we first develop a fast normalized cuts algorithm. We then propose a high-performance hierarchical segmenter that makes effective use of multiscale information. Finally, we propose a grouping strategy that combines our multiscale regions into highly-accurate object proposals by exploring efficiently their combinatorial space. We also present Single-scale Combinatorial Grouping (SCG), a faster version of MCG that produces competitive proposals in under five seconds per image. We conduct an extensive and comprehensive empirical validation on the BSDS500, SegVOC12, SBD, and COCO datasets, showing that MCG produces state-of-the-art contours, hierarchical regions, and object proposals.
Recently, two works proposed to train a cascade of classifiers to learn which sets of regions should be merged to form objects. Ren and Shankhnarovich @cite_43 produce full region hierarchies by iteratively merging pairs of regions and adapting the classifiers to different scales. Weiss and Taskar @cite_46 specialize the classifiers also to size and class of the annotated instances to produce object proposals.
@cite_43 @cite_46
2040072996 2088432363
We propose a hierarchical segmentation algorithm that starts with a very fine over segmentation and gradually merges regions using a cascade of boundary classifiers. This approach allows the weights of region and boundary features to adapt to the segmentation scale at which they are applied. The stages of the cascade are trained sequentially, with asymetric loss to maximize boundary recall. On six segmentation data sets, our algorithm achieves best performance under most region-quality measures, and does it with fewer segments than the prior work. Our algorithm is also highly competitive in a dense over segmentation (super pixel) regime under boundary-based measures. We propose SCALPEL, a flexible method for object segmentation that integrates rich region-merging cues with mid- and high-level information about object layout, class, and scale into the segmentation process. Unlike competing approaches, SCALPEL uses a cascade of bottom-up segmentation models that is capable of learning to ignore boundaries early on, yet use them as a stopping criterion once the object has been mostly segmented. Furthermore, we show how such cascades can be learned efficiently. When paired with a novel method that generates better localized shape priors than our competitors, our method leads to a concise, accurate set of segmentation proposals, these proposals are more accurate on the PASCAL VOC2010 dataset than state-of-the-art methods that use re-ranking to filter much larger bags of proposals. The code for our algorithm is available online.