Existing methods for pixel-wise labelling tasks generally disregard the underlying structure of labellings, often leading to predictions that are visually implausible. While incorporating structure into the model should improve prediction quality, doing so is challenging - manually specifying the form of structural constraints may be impractical and inference often becomes intractable even if structural constraints are given. We sidestep this problem by reducing structured prediction to a sequence of unconstrained prediction problems and demonstrate that this approach is capable of automatically discovering priors on shape, contiguity of region predictions and smoothness of region contours from data without any a priori specification. On the instance segmentation task, this method outperforms the state-of-the-art, achieving a mean @math of 63.6 at 50 overlap and 43.3 at 70 overlap.
@cite_30: Recognition algorithms based on convolutional networks (CNNs) typically use the output of the last layer as a feature representation. However, the information in this layer may be too coarse spatially to allow precise localization. On the contrary, earlier layers may be precise in localization but will not capture semantics. To get the best of both worlds, we define the hypercolumn at a pixel as the vector of activations of all CNN units above that pixel. Using hypercolumns as pixel descriptors, we show results on three fine-grained localization tasks: simultaneous detection and segmentation [22], where we improve state-of-the-art from 49.7 mean APr [22] to 60.0, keypoint localization, where we get a 3.3 point boost over [20], and part labeling, where we show a 6.6 point gain over a strong baseline.
@cite_35: 
@cite_18: We present a modification of “Normalized Cuts” to incorporate priors which can be used for constrained image segmentation. Compared to previous generalizations of “Normalized Cuts” which incorporate constraints, our technique has two advantages. First, we seek solutions which are sufficiently “correlated” with priors which allows us to use noisy top-down information, for example from an object detector. Second, given the spectral solution of the unconstrained problem, the solution of the constrained one can be computed in small additional time, which allows us to run the algorithm in an interactive mode. We compare our algorithm to other graph cut based algorithms and highlight the advantages.
@cite_14: 
@cite_7: 
@cite_8: We present a new learning algorithm for Boltzmann machines that contain many layers of hidden variables. Data-dependent expectations are estimated using a variational approximation that tends to focus on a single mode, and dataindependent expectations are approximated using persistent Markov chains. The use of two quite different techniques for estimating the two types of expectation that enter into the gradient of the log-likelihood makes it practical to learn Boltzmann machines with multiple hidden layers and millions of parameters. The learning can be made more efficient by using a layer-by-layer “pre-training” phase that allows variational inference to be initialized with a single bottomup pass. We present results on the MNIST and NORB datasets showing that deep Boltzmann machines learn good generative models and perform well on handwritten digit and visual object recognition tasks.
@cite_0: 
@cite_19: A good model of object shape is essential in applications such as segmentation, detection, inpainting and graphics. For example, when performing segmentation, local constraints on the shapes can help where object boundaries are noisy or unclear, and global constraints can resolve ambiguities where background clutter looks similar to parts of the objects. In general, the stronger the model of shape, the more performance is improved. In this paper, we use a type of deep Boltzmann machine (Salakhutdinov and Hinton, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2009) that we call a Shape Boltzmann Machine (SBM) for the task of modeling foreground background (binary) and parts-based (categorical) shape images. We show that the SBM characterizes a strong model of shape, in that samples from the model look realistic and it can generalize to generate samples that differ from training examples. We find that the SBM learns distributions that are qualitatively and quantitatively better than existing models for this task.
@cite_23: 
@cite_2: In this paper, we propose techniques to make use of two complementary bottom-up features, image edges and texture patches, to guide top-down object segmentation towards higher precision. We build upon the part-based pose-let detector, which can predict masks for numerous parts of an object. For this purpose we extend poselets to 19 other categories apart from person. We non-rigidly align these part detections to potential object contours in the image, both to increase the precision of the predicted object mask and to sort out false positives. We spatially aggregate object information via a variational smoothing technique while ensuring that object regions do not overlap. Finally, we propose to refine the segmentation based on self-similarity defined on small image patches. We obtain competitive results on the challenging Pascal VOC benchmark. On four classes we achieve the best numbers to-date.
@cite_34: The problem of efficient, interactive foreground background segmentation in still images is of great practical importance in image editing. Classical image segmentation tools use either texture (colour) information, e.g. Magic Wand, or edge (contrast) information, e.g. Intelligent Scissors. Recently, an approach based on optimization by graph-cut has been developed which successfully combines both types of information. In this paper we extend the graph-cut approach in three respects. First, we have developed a more powerful, iterative version of the optimisation. Secondly, the power of the iterative algorithm is used to simplify substantially the user interaction needed for a given quality of result. Thirdly, a robust algorithm for "border matting" has been developed to estimate simultaneously the alpha-matte around an object boundary and the colours of foreground pixels. We show that for moderately difficult examples the proposed method outperforms competitive tools.
@cite_10: Pixel-level labelling tasks, such as semantic segmentation, play a central role in image understanding. Recent approaches have attempted to harness the capabilities of deep learning techniques for image recognition to tackle pixel-level labelling tasks. One central issue in this methodology is the limited capacity of deep learning techniques to delineate visual objects. To solve this problem, we introduce a new form of convolutional neural network that combines the strengths of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs)-based probabilistic graphical modelling. To this end, we formulate Conditional Random Fields with Gaussian pairwise potentials and mean-field approximate inference as Recurrent Neural Networks. This network, called CRF-RNN, is then plugged in as a part of a CNN to obtain a deep network that has desirable properties of both CNNs and CRFs. Importantly, our system fully integrates CRF modelling with CNNs, making it possible to train the whole deep network end-to-end with the usual back-propagation algorithm, avoiding offline post-processing methods for object delineation. We apply the proposed method to the problem of semantic image segmentation, obtaining top results on the challenging Pascal VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark.
When producing figure-ground masks for detections, most of these approaches predict every pixel independently. However, this disregards the fact that pixels in the image are hardly independent of each other, and a figure-ground labeling has to satisfy certain constraints. Some of these constraints can be simply encoded as local smoothness: nearby pixels of similar color should be labeled similarly. This can be achieved simply by aligning the predicted segmentation to image contours @cite_2 or projecting to superpixels @cite_30 . More sophisticated approaches model the problem using CRFs with unary and pairwise potentials @cite_34 @cite_35 @cite_7 . Later work considers extending these models by incorporating higher-order potentials of specific forms for which inference is tractable @cite_0 @cite_23 . A related line of work explores learning a generative model of masks @cite_19 using a deep Boltzmann machine @cite_8 . @cite_10 show that inference in CRFs can be viewed as recurrent neural nets and trained together with a CNN to label pixels, resulting in large gains. Another alternative is to use eigenvectors obtained from normalized cuts as an embedding for pixels @cite_18 @cite_14 .