Segmentation-aware deformable part models

Trabajo presentado a la IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), celebrada del 23 al 28 de junio de 2014 en Columbus, Ohio (US).In this work we propose a technique to combine bottom-up segmentation, coming in the form of SLIC superpixels, with sliding window detectors, such as Deformable Part Models (DPMs). The merit of our approach lies in >cleaning up> the low-level HOG features by exploiting the spatial support of SLIC superpixels, this can be understood as using segmentation to split the feature variation into object-specific and background changes. Rather than committing to a single segmentation we use a large pool of SLIC superpixels and combine them in a scale-, position- and object-dependent manner to build soft segmentation masks. The segmentation masks can be computed fast enough to repeat this process over every candidate window, during training and detection, for both the root and part filters of DPMs. We use these masks to construct enhanced, background-invariant features to train DPMs. We test our approach on the PASCAL VOC 2007, outperforming the standard DPM in 17 out of 20 classes, yielding an average increase of 1.7% AP. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of this approach, extending it to dense SIFT descriptors for large displacement optical flow.This work has been partially funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under projects PAU+ DPI2011-27510, TaskCoop DPI2010-17112, and ERA-Net Chistera project ViSen PCIN-2013-047; by the EU project ARCAS FP7-ICT-2011-28761; by grant ANR-10-JCJC-0205; and by the EU Project MOBOT FP7-ICT-2011-600796.Peer Reviewe

Deformable Part-based Fully Convolutional Network for Object Detection

Existing region-based object detectors are limited to regions with fixed box geometry to represent objects, even if those are highly non-rectangular. In this paper we introduce DP-FCN, a deep model for object detection which explicitly adapts to shapes of objects with deformable parts. Without additional annotations, it learns to focus on discriminative elements and to align them, and simultaneously brings more invariance for classification and geometric information to refine localization. DP-FCN is composed of three main modules: a Fully Convolutional Network to efficiently maintain spatial resolution, a deformable part-based RoI pooling layer to optimize positions of parts and build invariance, and a deformation-aware localization module explicitly exploiting displacements of parts to improve accuracy of bounding box regression. We experimentally validate our model and show significant gains. DP-FCN achieves state-of-the-art performances of 83.1% and 80.9% on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 with VOC data only.Comment: Accepted to BMVC 2017 (oral

Deformable Convolutional Networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are inherently limited to model geometric transformations due to the fixed geometric structures in its building modules. In this work, we introduce two new modules to enhance the transformation modeling capacity of CNNs, namely, deformable convolution and deformable RoI pooling. Both are based on the idea of augmenting the spatial sampling locations in the modules with additional offsets and learning the offsets from target tasks, without additional supervision. The new modules can readily replace their plain counterparts in existing CNNs and can be easily trained end-to-end by standard back-propagation, giving rise to deformable convolutional networks. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach on sophisticated vision tasks of object detection and semantic segmentation. The code would be released

MaskLab: Instance Segmentation by Refining Object Detection with Semantic and Direction Features

In this work, we tackle the problem of instance segmentation, the task of simultaneously solving object detection and semantic segmentation. Towards this goal, we present a model, called MaskLab, which produces three outputs: box detection, semantic segmentation, and direction prediction. Building on top of the Faster-RCNN object detector, the predicted boxes provide accurate localization of object instances. Within each region of interest, MaskLab performs foreground/background segmentation by combining semantic and direction prediction. Semantic segmentation assists the model in distinguishing between objects of different semantic classes including background, while the direction prediction, estimating each pixel's direction towards its corresponding center, allows separating instances of the same semantic class. Moreover, we explore the effect of incorporating recent successful methods from both segmentation and detection (i.e. atrous convolution and hypercolumn). Our proposed model is evaluated on the COCO instance segmentation benchmark and shows comparable performance with other state-of-art models.Comment: 10 pages including referenc

A Framework for Symmetric Part Detection in Cluttered Scenes

The role of symmetry in computer vision has waxed and waned in importance during the evolution of the field from its earliest days. At first figuring prominently in support of bottom-up indexing, it fell out of favor as shape gave way to appearance and recognition gave way to detection. With a strong prior in the form of a target object, the role of the weaker priors offered by perceptual grouping was greatly diminished. However, as the field returns to the problem of recognition from a large database, the bottom-up recovery of the parts that make up the objects in a cluttered scene is critical for their recognition. The medial axis community has long exploited the ubiquitous regularity of symmetry as a basis for the decomposition of a closed contour into medial parts. However, today's recognition systems are faced with cluttered scenes, and the assumption that a closed contour exists, i.e. that figure-ground segmentation has been solved, renders much of the medial axis community's work inapplicable. In this article, we review a computational framework, previously reported in Lee et al. (2013), Levinshtein et al. (2009, 2013), that bridges the representation power of the medial axis and the need to recover and group an object's parts in a cluttered scene. Our framework is rooted in the idea that a maximally inscribed disc, the building block of a medial axis, can be modeled as a compact superpixel in the image. We evaluate the method on images of cluttered scenes.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure