Computing object skeletons in natural images is challenging, owing to large variations in object appearance and scale, and the complexity of handling background clutter. Many recent methods frame object skeleton detection as a binary pixel classification problem, which is similar in spirit to learning-based edge detection, as well as to semantic segmentation methods. In the present article, we depart from this strategy by training a CNN to predict a two-dimensional vector field, which maps each scene point to a candidate skeleton pixel, in the spirit of flux-based skeletonization algorithms. This "image context flux" representation has two major advantages over previous approaches. First, it explicitly encodes the relative position of skelet al pixels to semantically meaningful entities, such as the image points in their spatial context, and hence also the implied object boundaries. Second, since the skeleton detection context is a region-based vector field, it is better able to cope with object parts of large width. We evaluate the proposed method on three benchmark datasets for skeleton detection and two for symmetry detection, achieving consistently superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.
We propose a robust and accurate method to extract the centerlines and scale of tubular structures in 2D images and 3D volumes. Existing techniques rely either on filters designed to respond to ideal cylindrical structures, which lose accuracy when the linear structures become very irregular, or on classification, which is inaccurate because locations on centerlines and locations immediately next to them are extremely difficult to distinguish. We solve this problem by reformulating centerline detection in terms of a regression problem. We first train regressors to return the distances to the closest centerline in scale-space, and we apply them to the input images or volumes. The centerlines and the corresponding scale then correspond to the regressors local maxima, which can be easily identified. We show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for various 2D and 3D datasets. Local reflection symmetry detection in nature images is a quite important but challenging task in computer vision. The main obstacle is both the scales and the orientations of symmetric structure are unknown. The multiple instance learning (MIL) framework sheds lights onto this task owing to its capability to well accommodate the unknown scales and orientations of the symmetric structures. However, to differentiate symmetry vs non-symmetry remains to face extreme confusions caused by clutters scenes and ambiguous object structures. In this paper, we propose a novel multiple instance learning framework for local reflection symmetry detection, named multiple instance subspace learning (MISL), which instead learns a group of models respectively on well partitioned subspaces. To obtain such subspaces, we propose an efficient dividing strategy under MIL setting, named partial random projection tree (PRPT), by taking advantage of the fact that each sample (bag) is represented by the proposed symmetry features computed at specific scale and orientation combinations (instances). Encouraging experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that the proposed local reflection symmetry detection method outperforms current state-of-the-arts. HighlightsWe perform clustering on samples represented by multiple instances.We learn a group of MIL classifiers on subspaces.We report state-of-the-arts results on the symmetry detection benchmark. In this work we propose a learning-based approach to symmetry detection in natural images. We focus on ribbon-like structures, i.e. contours marking local and approximate reflection symmetry and make three contributions to improve their detection. First, we create and make publicly available a ground-truth dataset for this task by building on the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset. Second, we extract features representing multiple complementary cues, such as grayscale structure, color, texture, and spectral clustering information. Third, we use supervised learning to learn how to combine these cues, and employ MIL to accommodate the unknown scale and orientation of the symmetric structures. We systematically evaluate the performance contribution of each individual component in our pipeline, and demonstrate that overall we consistently improve upon results obtained using existing alternatives.