Kernel Cuts: MRF meets Kernel & Spectral Clustering

We propose a new segmentation model combining common regularization energies, e.g. Markov Random Field (MRF) potentials, and standard pairwise clustering criteria like Normalized Cut (NC), average association (AA), etc. These clustering and regularization models are widely used in machine learning and computer vision, but they were not combined before due to significant differences in the corresponding optimization, e.g. spectral relaxation and combinatorial max-flow techniques. On the one hand, we show that many common applications using MRF segmentation energies can benefit from a high-order NC term, e.g. enforcing balanced clustering of arbitrary high-dimensional image features combining color, texture, location, depth, motion, etc. On the other hand, standard clustering applications can benefit from an inclusion of common pairwise or higher-order MRF constraints, e.g. edge alignment, bin-consistency, label cost, etc. To address joint energies like NC+MRF, we propose efficient Kernel Cut algorithms based on bound optimization. While focusing on graph cut and move-making techniques, our new unary (linear) kernel and spectral bound formulations for common pairwise clustering criteria allow to integrate them with any regularization functionals with existing discrete or continuous solvers.Comment: The main ideas of this work are published in our conference papers: "Normalized cut meets MRF" [70] (ECCV 2016) and "Secrets of Grabcut and kernel K-means" [41] (ICCV 2015

Hierarchical Piecewise-Constant Super-regions

Recent applications in computer vision have come to heavily rely on superpixel over-segmentation as a pre-processing step for higher level vision tasks, such as object recognition, image labelling or image segmentation. Here we present a new superpixel algorithm called Hierarchical Piecewise-Constant Super-regions (HPCS), which not only obtains superpixels comparable to the state-of-the-art, but can also be applied hierarchically to form what we call n-th order super-regions. In essence, a Markov Random Field (MRF)-based anisotropic denoising formulation over the quantized feature space is adopted to form piecewise-constant image regions, which are then combined with a graph-based split & merge post-processing step to form superpixels. The graph and quantized feature based formulation of the problem allows us to generalize it hierarchically to preserve boundary adherence with fewer superpixels. Experimental results show that, despite the simplicity of our framework, it is able to provide high quality superpixels, and to hierarchically apply them to form layers of over-segmentation, each with a decreasing number of superpixels, while maintaining the same desired properties (such as adherence to strong image edges). The algorithm is also memory efficient and has a low computational cost

A Simple Unsupervised Color Image Segmentation Method based on MRF-MAP

Color image segmentation is an important topic in the image processing field. MRF-MAP is often adopted in the unsupervised segmentation methods, but their performance are far behind recent interactive segmentation tools supervised by user inputs. Furthermore, the existing related unsupervised methods also suffer from the low efficiency, and high risk of being trapped in the local optima, because MRF-MAP is currently solved by iterative frameworks with inaccurate initial color distribution models. To address these problems, the letter designs an efficient method to calculate the energy functions approximately in the non-iteration style, and proposes a new binary segmentation algorithm based on the slightly tuned Lanczos eigensolver. The experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm achieves competitive performance compared with two state-of-art segmentation methods.Comment: Submitted to IEEE SP

GMM-Based Hidden Markov Random Field for Color Image and 3D Volume Segmentation

In this project, we first study the Gaussian-based hidden Markov random field (HMRF) model and its expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Then we generalize it to Gaussian mixture model-based hidden Markov random field. The algorithm is implemented in MATLAB. We also apply this algorithm to color image segmentation problems and 3D volume segmentation problems

A regularization-based approach for unsupervised image segmentation

We propose a novel unsupervised image segmentation algorithm, which aims to segment an image into several coherent parts. It requires no user input, no supervised learning phase and assumes an unknown number of segments. It achieves this by first over-segmenting the image into several hundred superpixels. These are iteratively joined on the basis of a discriminative classifier trained on color and texture information obtained from each superpixel. The output of the classifier is regularized by a Markov random field that lends more influence to neighbouring superpixels that are more similar. In each iteration, similar superpixels fall under the same label, until only a few coherent regions remain in the image. The algorithm was tested on a standard evaluation data set, where it performs on par with state-of-the-art algorithms in term of precision and greatly outperforms the state of the art by reducing the oversegmentation of the object of interest

Beyond Pixels: A Comprehensive Survey from Bottom-up to Semantic Image Segmentation and Cosegmentation

Image segmentation refers to the process to divide an image into nonoverlapping meaningful regions according to human perception, which has become a classic topic since the early ages of computer vision. A lot of research has been conducted and has resulted in many applications. However, while many segmentation algorithms exist, yet there are only a few sparse and outdated summarizations available, an overview of the recent achievements and issues is lacking. We aim to provide a comprehensive review of the recent progress in this field. Covering 180 publications, we give an overview of broad areas of segmentation topics including not only the classic bottom-up approaches, but also the recent development in superpixel, interactive methods, object proposals, semantic image parsing and image cosegmentation. In addition, we also review the existing influential datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we suggest some design flavors and research directions for future research in image segmentation.Comment: submitted to Elsevier Journal of Visual Communications and Image Representatio

Find my mug: Efficient object search with a mobile robot using semantic segmentation

In this paper, we propose an efficient semantic segmentation framework for indoor scenes, tailored to the application on a mobile robot. Semantic segmentation can help robots to gain a reasonable understanding of their environment, but to reach this goal, the algorithms not only need to be accurate, but also fast and robust. Therefore, we developed an optimized 3D point cloud processing framework based on a Randomized Decision Forest, achieving competitive results at sufficiently high frame rates. We evaluate the capabilities of our method on the popular NYU depth dataset and our own data and demonstrate its feasibility by deploying it on a mobile service robot, for which we could optimize an object search procedure using our results.Comment: Part of the OAGM 2014 proceedings (arXiv:1404.3538

Combination of Hidden Markov Random Field and Conjugate Gradient for Brain Image Segmentation

Image segmentation is the process of partitioning the image into significant regions easier to analyze. Nowadays, segmentation has become a necessity in many practical medical imaging methods as locating tumors and diseases. Hidden Markov Random Field model is one of several techniques used in image segmentation. It provides an elegant way to model the segmentation process. This modeling leads to the minimization of an objective function. Conjugate Gradient algorithm (CG) is one of the best known optimization techniques. This paper proposes the use of the Conjugate Gradient algorithm (CG) for image segmentation, based on the Hidden Markov Random Field. Since derivatives are not available for this expression, finite differences are used in the CG algorithm to approximate the first derivative. The approach is evaluated using a number of publicly available images, where ground truth is known. The Dice Coefficient is used as an objective criterion to measure the quality of segmentation. The results show that the proposed CG approach compares favorably with other variants of Hidden Markov Random Field segmentation algorithms

Fast image-based obstacle detection from unmanned surface vehicles

Obstacle detection plays an important role in unmanned surface vehicles (USV). The USVs operate in highly diverse environments in which an obstacle may be a floating piece of wood, a scuba diver, a pier, or a part of a shoreline, which presents a significant challenge to continuous detection from images taken onboard. This paper addresses the problem of online detection by constrained unsupervised segmentation. To this end, a new graphical model is proposed that affords a fast and continuous obstacle image-map estimation from a single video stream captured onboard a USV. The model accounts for the semantic structure of marine environment as observed from USV by imposing weak structural constraints. A Markov random field framework is adopted and a highly efficient algorithm for simultaneous optimization of model parameters and segmentation mask estimation is derived. Our approach does not require computationally intensive extraction of texture features and comfortably runs in real-time. The algorithm is tested on a new, challenging, dataset for segmentation and obstacle detection in marine environments, which is the largest annotated dataset of its kind. Results on this dataset show that our model outperforms the related approaches, while requiring a fraction of computational effort.Comment: This is an extended version of the ACCV2014 paper [Kristan et al., 2014] submitted to a journal. [Kristan et al., 2014] M. Kristan, J. Pers, V. Sulic, S. Kovacic, A graphical model for rapid obstacle image-map estimation from unmanned surface vehicles, in Proc. Asian Conf. Computer Vision, 201

On Regularized Losses for Weakly-supervised CNN Segmentation

Minimization of regularized losses is a principled approach to weak supervision well-established in deep learning, in general. However, it is largely overlooked in semantic segmentation currently dominated by methods mimicking full supervision via "fake" fully-labeled training masks (proposals) generated from available partial input. To obtain such full masks the typical methods explicitly use standard regularization techniques for "shallow" segmentation, e.g. graph cuts or dense CRFs. In contrast, we integrate such standard regularizers directly into the loss functions over partial input. This approach simplifies weakly-supervised training by avoiding extra MRF/CRF inference steps or layers explicitly generating full masks, while improving both the quality and efficiency of training. This paper proposes and experimentally compares different losses integrating MRF/CRF regularization terms. We juxtapose our regularized losses with earlier proposal-generation methods using explicit regularization steps or layers. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in semantic segmentation with near full-supervision quality