Scene parsing, or semantic segmentation, consists in labeling each pixel in
an image with the category of the object it belongs to. It is a challenging
task that involves the simultaneous detection, segmentation and recognition of
all the objects in the image.
The scene parsing method proposed here starts by computing a tree of segments
from a graph of pixel dissimilarities. Simultaneously, a set of dense feature
vectors is computed which encodes regions of multiple sizes centered on each
pixel. The feature extractor is a multiscale convolutional network trained from
raw pixels. The feature vectors associated with the segments covered by each
node in the tree are aggregated and fed to a classifier which produces an
estimate of the distribution of object categories contained in the segment. A
subset of tree nodes that cover the image are then selected so as to maximize
the average "purity" of the class distributions, hence maximizing the overall
likelihood that each segment will contain a single object. The convolutional
network feature extractor is trained end-to-end from raw pixels, alleviating
the need for engineered features. After training, the system is parameter free.
The system yields record accuracies on the Stanford Background Dataset (8
classes), the Sift Flow Dataset (33 classes) and the Barcelona Dataset (170
classes) while being an order of magnitude faster than competing approaches,
producing a 320 \times 240 image labeling in less than 1 second.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures - Published in 29th International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML 2012), Jun 2012, Edinburgh, United Kingdo