In this paper, we propose a fast fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) for crowd segmentation. By replacing the fully connected layers in CNN with 1 by 1 convolution kernels, FCNN takes whole images as inputs and directly outputs segmentation maps by one pass of forward propagation. It has the property of translation invariance like patch-by-patch scanning but with much lower computation cost. Once FCNN is learned, it can process input images of any sizes without warping them to a standard size. These attractive properties make it extendable to other general image segmentation problems. Based on FCNN, a multi-stage deep learning is proposed to integrate appearance and motion cues for crowd segmentation. Both appearance filters and motion filers are pretrained stage-by-stage and then jointly optimized. Different combination methods are investigated. The effectiveness of our approach and component-wise analysis are evaluated on two crowd segmentation datasets created by us, which include image frames from 235 and 11 scenes, respectively. They are currently the largest crowd segmentation datasets and will be released to the public.
Scene labeling consists of labeling each pixel in an image with the category of the object it belongs to. We propose a method that uses a multiscale convolutional network trained from raw pixels to extract dense feature vectors that encode regions of multiple sizes centered on each pixel. The method alleviates the need for engineered features, and produces a powerful representation that captures texture, shape, and contextual information. We report results using multiple postprocessing methods to produce the final labeling. Among those, we propose a technique to automatically retrieve, from a pool of segmentation components, an optimal set of components that best explain the scene; these components are arbitrary, for example, they can be taken from a segmentation tree or from any family of oversegmentations. The system yields record accuracies on the SIFT Flow dataset (33 classes) and the Barcelona dataset (170 classes) and near-record accuracy on Stanford background dataset (eight classes), while being an order of magnitude faster than competing approaches, producing a 320×240 image labeling in less than a second, including feature extraction.  The goal of the scene labeling task is to assign a class label to each pixel in an image. To ensure a good visual coherence and a high class accuracy, it is essential for a model to capture long range (pixel) label dependencies in images. In a feed-forward architecture, this can be achieved simply by considering a sufficiently large input context patch, around each pixel to be labeled. We propose an approach that consists of a recurrent convolutional neural network which allows us to consider a large input context while limiting the capacity of the model. Contrary to most standard approaches, our method does not rely on any segmentation technique nor any task-specific features. The system is trained in an end-to-end manner over raw pixels, and models complex spatial dependencies with low inference cost. As the context size increases with the built-in recurrence, the system identifies and corrects its own errors. Our approach yields state-of-the-art performance on both the Stanford Background Dataset and the SIFT Flow Dataset, while remaining very fast at test time. We propose a new Deep Decompositional Network (DDN) for parsing pedestrian images into semantic regions, such as hair, head, body, arms, and legs, where the pedestrians can be heavily occluded. Unlike existing methods based on template matching or Bayesian inference, our approach directly maps low-level visual features to the label maps of body parts with DDN, which is able to accurately estimate complex pose variations with good robustness to occlusions and background clutters. DDN jointly estimates occluded regions and segments body parts by stacking three types of hidden layers: occlusion estimation layers, completion layers, and decomposition layers. The occlusion estimation layers estimate a binary mask, indicating which part of a pedestrian is invisible. The completion layers synthesize low-level features of the invisible part from the original features and the occlusion mask. The decomposition layers directly transform the synthesized visual features to label maps. We devise a new strategy to pre-train these hidden layers, and then fine-tune the entire network using the stochastic gradient descent. Experimental results show that our approach achieves better segmentation accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods on pedestrian images with or without occlusions. Another important contribution of this paper is that it provides a large scale benchmark human parsing dataset that includes 3,673 annotated samples collected from 171 surveillance videos. It is 20 times larger than existing public datasets.