Contour detection has been a fundamental component in many image segmentation and object detection systems. Most previous work utilizes low-level features such as texture or saliency to detect contours and then use them as cues for a higher-level task such as object detection. However, we claim that recognizing objects and predicting contours are two mutually related tasks. Contrary to traditional approaches, we show that we can invert the commonly established pipeline: instead of detecting contours with low-level cues for a higher-level recognition task, we exploit object-related features as high-level cues for contour detection. We achieve this goal by means of a multi-scale deep network that consists of five convolutional layers and a bifurcated fully-connected sub-network. The section from the input layer to the fifth convolutional layer is fixed and directly lifted from a pre-trained network optimized over a large-scale object classification task. This section of the network is applied to four different scales of the image input. These four parallel and identical streams are then attached to a bifurcated sub-network consisting of two independently-trained branches. One branch learns to predict the contour likelihood (with a classification objective) whereas the other branch is trained to learn the fraction of human labelers agreeing about the contour presence at a given point (with a regression criterion). We show that without any feature engineering our multi-scale deep learning approach achieves state-of-the-art results in contour detection.
We propose a novel approach to both learning and detecting local contour-based representations for mid-level features. Our features, called sketch tokens, are learned using supervised mid-level information in the form of hand drawn contours in images. Patches of human generated contours are clustered to form sketch token classes and a random forest classifier is used for efficient detection in novel images. We demonstrate our approach on both top-down and bottom-up tasks. We show state-of-the-art results on the top-down task of contour detection while being over 200x faster than competing methods. We also achieve large improvements in detection accuracy for the bottom-up tasks of pedestrian and object detection as measured on INRIA and PASCAL, respectively. These gains are due to the complementary information provided by sketch tokens to low-level features such as gradient histograms. Edge detection is a critical component of many vision systems, including object detectors and image segmentation algorithms. Patches of edges exhibit well-known forms of local structure, such as straight lines or T-junctions. In this paper we take advantage of the structure present in local image patches to learn both an accurate and computationally efficient edge detector. We formulate the problem of predicting local edge masks in a structured learning framework applied to random decision forests. Our novel approach to learning decision trees robustly maps the structured labels to a discrete space on which standard information gain measures may be evaluated. The result is an approach that obtains real time performance that is orders of magnitude faster than many competing state-of-the-art approaches, while also achieving state-of-the-art edge detection results on the BSDS500 Segmentation dataset and NYU Depth dataset. Finally, we show the potential of our approach as a general purpose edge detector by showing our learned edge models generalize well across datasets.