Human parsing has recently attracted a lot of research interests due to its huge application potentials. However existing datasets have limited number of images and annotations, and lack the variety of human appearances and the coverage of challenging cases in unconstrained environment. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark "Look into Person (LIP)" that makes a significant advance in terms of scalability, diversity and difficulty, a contribution that we feel is crucial for future developments in human-centric analysis. This comprehensive dataset contains over 50,000 elaborately annotated images with 19 semantic part labels, which are captured from a wider range of viewpoints, occlusions and background complexity. Given these rich annotations we perform detailed analyses of the leading human parsing approaches, gaining insights into the success and failures of these methods. Furthermore, in contrast to the existing efforts on improving the feature discriminative capability, we solve human parsing by exploring a novel self-supervised structure-sensitive learning approach, which imposes human pose structures into parsing results without resorting to extra supervision (i.e., no need for specifically labeling human joints in model training). Our self-supervised learning framework can be injected into any advanced neural networks to help incorporate rich high-level knowledge regarding human joints from a global perspective and improve the parsing results. Extensive evaluations on our LIP and the public PASCAL-Person-Part dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Incorporating multi-scale features in fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) has been a key element to achieving state-of-the-art performance on semantic image segmentation. One common way to extract multi-scale features is to feed multiple resized input images to a shared deep network and then merge the resulting features for pixelwise classification. In this work, we propose an attention mechanism that learns to softly weight the multi-scale features at each pixel location. We adapt a state-of-the-art semantic image segmentation model, which we jointly train with multi-scale input images and the attention model. The proposed attention model not only outperforms average- and max-pooling, but allows us to diagnostically visualize the importance of features at different positions and scales. Moreover, we show that adding extra supervision to the output at each scale is essential to achieving excellent performance when merging multi-scale features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with extensive experiments on three challenging datasets, including PASCAL-Person-Part, PASCAL VOC 2012 and a subset of MS-COCO 2014.   In this work, we address the human parsing task with a novel Contextualized Convolutional Neural Network (Co-CNN) architecture, which well integrates the cross-layer context, global image-level context, within-super-pixel context and cross-super-pixel neighborhood context into a unified network. Given an input human image, Co-CNN produces the pixel-wise categorization in an end-to-end way. First, the cross-layer context is captured by our basic local-to-global-to-local structure, which hierarchically combines the global semantic structure and the local fine details within the cross-layers. Second, the global image-level label prediction is used as an auxiliary objective in the intermediate layer of the Co-CNN, and its outputs are further used for guiding the feature learning in subsequent convolutional layers to leverage the global image-level context. Finally, to further utilize the local super-pixel contexts, the within-super-pixel smoothing and cross-super-pixel neighbourhood voting are formulated as natural sub-components of the Co-CNN to achieve the local label consistency in both training and testing process. Comprehensive evaluations on two public datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Co-CNN architecture over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F-1 score on the large dataset [15] reaches 76.95 by Co-CNN, significantly higher than 62.81 and 64.38 by the state-of-the-art algorithms, M-CNN [21] and ATR [15], respectively. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have recently shown state of the art performance in high level vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection. This work brings together methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models for addressing the task of pixel-level classification (also called "semantic image segmentation"). We show that responses at the final layer of DCNNs are not sufficiently localized for accurate object segmentation. This is due to the very invariance properties that make DCNNs good for high level tasks. We overcome this poor localization property of deep networks by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF). Qualitatively, our "DeepLab" system is able to localize segment boundaries at a level of accuracy which is beyond previous methods. Quantitatively, our method sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 71.6 IOU accuracy in the test set. We show how these results can be obtained efficiently: Careful network re-purposing and a novel application of the 'hole' algorithm from the wavelet community allow dense computation of neural net responses at 8 frames per second on a modern GPU. Parsing human regions into semantic parts, e.g., body, head and arms etc., from a random natural image is challenging while fundamental for computer vision and widely applicable in industry. One major difficulty to handle such a problem is the high flexibility of scale and location of a human instance and its corresponding parts, making the parsing task either lack of boundary details or suffer from local confusions. To tackle such problems, in this work, we propose the "Auto-Zoom Net" (AZN) for human part parsing, which is a unified fully convolutional neural network structure that: (1) parses each human instance into detailed parts. (2) predicts the locations and scales of human instances and their corresponding parts. In our unified network, the two tasks are mutually beneficial. The score maps obtained for parsing help estimate the locations and scales for human instances and their parts. With the predicted locations and scales, our model "zooms" the region into a right scale to further refine the parsing. In practice, we perform the two tasks iteratively so that detailed human parts are gradually recovered. We conduct extensive experiments over the challenging PASCAL-Person-Part segmentation, and show our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-art parsing techniques especially for instances and parts at small scale. In addition, we perform experiments for horse and cow segmentation and also obtain results which are considerably better than state-of-the-art methods (by over 5 )., which is contribued by the proposed iterative zooming process. This paper addresses the problem of semantic part parsing (segmentation) of cars, i.e.assigning every pixel within the car to one of the parts (e.g.body, window, lights, license plates and wheels). We formulate this as a landmark identification problem, where a set of landmarks specifies the boundaries of the parts. A novel mixture of graphical models is proposed, which dynamically couples the landmarks to a hierarchy of segments. When modeling pairwise relation between landmarks, this coupling enables our model to exploit the local image contents in addition to spatial deformation, an aspect that most existing graphical models ignore. In particular, our model enforces appearance consistency between segments within the same part. Parsing the car, including finding the optimal coupling between landmarks and segments in the hierarchy, is performed by dynamic programming. We evaluate our method on a subset of PASCAL VOC 2010 car images and on the car subset of 3D Object Category dataset (CAR3D). We show good results and, in particular, quantify the effectiveness of using the segment appearance consistency in terms of accuracy of part localization and segmentation. Parsing human into semantic parts is crucial to human-centric analysis. In this paper, we propose a human parsing pipeline that uses pose cues, i.e., estimates of human joint locations, to provide pose-guided segment proposals for semantic parts. These segment proposals are ranked using standard appearance cues, deep-learned semantic feature, and a novel pose feature called pose-context. Then these proposals are selected and assembled using an And-Or graph to output a parse of the person. The And-Or graph is able to deal with large human appearance variability due to pose, choice of clothes, etc. We evaluate our approach on the popular Penn-Fudan pedestrian parsing dataset, showing that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, and perform diagnostics to demonstrate the effectiveness of different stages of our pipeline. Clothing recognition is an extremely challenging problem due to wide variation in clothing item appearance, layering, and style. In this paper, we tackle the clothing parsing problem using a retrieval based approach. For a query image, we find similar styles from a large database of tagged fashion images and use these examples to parse the query. Our approach combines parsing from: pre-trained global clothing models, local clothing models learned on the fly from retrieved examples, and transferred parse masks (paper doll item transfer) from retrieved examples. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms state of the art in parsing accuracy. In this paper, we study the problem of semantic part segmentation for animals. This is more challenging than standard object detection, object segmentation and pose estimation tasks because semantic parts of animals often have similar appearance and highly varying shapes. To tackle these challenges, we build a mixture of compositional models to represent the object boundary and the boundaries of semantic parts. And we incorporate edge, appearance, and semantic part cues into the compositional model. Given part-level segmentation annotation, we develop a novel algorithm to learn a mixture of compositional models under various poses and viewpoints for certain animal classes. Furthermore, a linear complexity algorithm is offered for efficient inference of the compositional model using dynamic programming. We evaluate our method for horse and cow using a newly annotated dataset on Pascal VOC 2010 which has pixelwise part labels. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In this paper we tackle the problem of clothing parsing: Our goal is to segment and classify different garments a person is wearing. We frame the problem as the one of inference in a pose-aware Conditional Random Field (CRF) which exploits appearance, figure ground segmentation, shape and location priors for each garment as well as similarities between segments, and symmetries between different human body parts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Fashionista dataset [1] and show that we can obtain a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.  Segmenting semantic objects from images and parsing them into their respective semantic parts are fundamental steps towards detailed object understanding in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a joint solution that tackles semantic object and part segmentation simultaneously, in which higher object-level context is provided to guide part segmentation, and more detailed part-level localization is utilized to refine object segmentation. Specifically, we first introduce the concept of semantic compositional parts (SCP) in which similar semantic parts are grouped and shared among different objects. A two-channel fully convolutional network (FCN) is then trained to provide the SCP and object potentials at each pixel. At the same time, a compact set of segments can also be obtained from the SCP predictions of the network. Given the potentials and the generated segments, in order to explore long-range context, we finally construct an efficient fully connected conditional random field (FCRF) to jointly predict the final object and part labels. Extensive evaluation on three different datasets shows that our approach can mutually enhance the performance of object and part segmentation, and outperforms the current state-of-the-art on both tasks. In this paper we demonstrate an effective method for parsing clothing in fashion photographs, an extremely challenging problem due to the large number of possible garment items, variations in configuration, garment appearance, layering, and occlusion. In addition, we provide a large novel dataset and tools for labeling garment items, to enable future research on clothing estimation. Finally, we present intriguing initial results on using clothing estimates to improve pose identification, and demonstrate a prototype application for pose-independent visual garment retrieval.