Coarse-to-fine Image Co-segmentation with Intra and Inter Rank Constraints

Coarse-to-fine Image Co-segmentation with Intra and Inter Rank Constraints

Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song, Dongxiang Zhang, Heng Tao Shen

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 719-725. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/100

Image co-segmentation is the problem of automatically discovering the common objects co-occurring in a set of relevant images and segmenting them as foreground simultaneously. Although a bunch of approaches have been proposed to address this problem, many of them still suffer from certain limitations, e.g., supervised feature learning and complex models, which hinder their capability in the real-world scenarios. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine co-segmentation (CFC) framework, which utilizes the coarse foreground and background proposals to learn a robust similarity measure of the features in an unsupervised way, and then devises a simple objective function based on the definition of image co-segmentation. Specifically, we first generate superpixels for all the images and extract their features. Instead of using existing distance metrics, we utilize object proposal methods to generate coarse foreground and background to learn a similarity measure of superpixels to construct a robust feature similarity graph. Then we design an intuitive objective function to learn a segmentation similarity graph which should be consistent with feature similarity graph and also be able to co-segment the superpixels in the images into either foreground and background. This objective function can be further reformulated as a graph learning problem with intra and inter rank constraints. Experiments on two commonly used image datasets (iCoseg and MSRC) demonstrate that CFC outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Notably, this performance is achieved by using only HSV feature.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Machine Learning
Computer Vision: Computer Vision