In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits object segmentation in order to improve the accuracy of object detection. We frame the problem as inference in a Markov Random Field, in which each detection hypothesis scores object appearance as well as contextual information using Convolutional Neural Networks, and allows the hypothesis to choose and score a segment out of a large pool of accurate object segmentation proposals. This enables the detector to incorporate additional evidence when it is available and thus results in more accurate detections. Our experiments show an improvement of 4.1 in mAP over the R-CNN baseline on PASCAL VOC 2010, and 3.4 over the current state-of-the-art, demonstrating the power of our approach.
Detecting objects becomes difficult when we need to deal with large shape deformation, occlusion and low resolution. We propose a novel approach to i) handle large deformations and partial occlusions in animals (as examples of highly deformable objects), ii) describe them in terms of body parts, and iii) detect them when their body parts are hard to detect (e.g., animals depicted at low resolution). We represent the holistic object and body parts separately and use a fully connected model to arrange templates for the holistic object and body parts. Our model automatically decouples the holistic object or body parts from the model when they are hard to detect. This enables us to represent a large number of holistic object and body part combinations to better deal with different "detectability" patterns caused by deformations, occlusion and or low resolution. We apply our method to the six animal categories in the PASCAL VOC dataset and show that our method significantly improves state-of-the-art (by 4.1 AP) and provides a richer representation for objects. During training we use annotations for body parts (e.g., head, torso, etc.), making use of a new dataset of fully annotated object parts for PASCAL VOC 2010, which provides a mask for each part.  Feature extraction, coding and pooling, are important components on many contemporary object recognition paradigms. In this paper we explore novel pooling techniques that encode the second-order statistics of local descriptors inside a region. To achieve this effect, we introduce multiplicative second-order analogues of average and max-pooling that together with appropriate non-linearities lead to state-of-the-art performance on free-form region recognition, without any type of feature coding. Instead of coding, we found that enriching local descriptors with additional image information leads to large performance gains, especially in conjunction with the proposed pooling methodology. We show that second-order pooling over free-form regions produces results superior to those of the winning systems in the Pascal VOC 2011 semantic segmentation challenge, with models that are 20,000 times faster. In this paper we are interested in how semantic segmentation can help object detection. Towards this goal, we propose a novel deformable part-based model which exploits region-based segmentation algorithms that compute candidate object regions by bottom-up clustering followed by ranking of those regions. Our approach allows every detection hypothesis to select a segment (including void), and scores each box in the image using both the traditional HOG filters as well as a set of novel segmentation features. Thus our model blends'' between the detector and segmentation models. Since our features can be computed very efficiently given the segments, we maintain the same complexity as the original DPM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in PASCAL VOC 2010, and show that when employing only a root filter our approach outperforms Dalal & Triggs detector on all classes, achieving 13 higher average AP. When employing the parts, we outperform the original DPM in @math out of @math classes, achieving an improvement of 8 AP. Furthermore, we outperform the previous state-of-the-art on VOC 2010 test by 4 . We describe an object detection system based on mixtures of multiscale deformable part models. Our system is able to represent highly variable object classes and achieves state-of-the-art results in the PASCAL object detection challenges. While deformable part models have become quite popular, their value had not been demonstrated on difficult benchmarks such as the PASCAL data sets. Our system relies on new methods for discriminative training with partially labeled data. We combine a margin-sensitive approach for data-mining hard negative examples with a formalism we call latent SVM. A latent SVM is a reformulation of MI--SVM in terms of latent variables. A latent SVM is semiconvex, and the training problem becomes convex once latent information is specified for the positive examples. This leads to an iterative training algorithm that alternates between fixing latent values for positive examples and optimizing the latent SVM objective function. In this paper we study the role of context in existing state-of-the-art detection and segmentation approaches. Towards this goal, we label every pixel of PASCAL VOC 2010 detection challenge with a semantic category. We believe this data will provide plenty of challenges to the community, as it contains 520 additional classes for semantic segmentation and object detection. Our analysis shows that nearest neighbor based approaches perform poorly on semantic segmentation of contextual classes, showing the variability of PASCAL imagery. Furthermore, improvements of exist ing contextual models for detection is rather modest. In order to push forward the performance in this difficult scenario, we propose a novel deformable part-based model, which exploits both local context around each candidate detection as well as global context at the level of the scene. We show that this contextual reasoning significantly helps in detecting objects at all scales.