Region-based Segmentation and Object Detection

Object detection and multi-class image segmentation are two closely related tasks that can be greatly improved when solved jointly by feeding information from one task to the other [10, 11]. However, current state-of-the-art models use a separate representation for each task making joint inference clumsy and leaving the classification of many parts of the scene ambiguous. In this work, we propose a hierarchical region-based approach to joint object detection and image segmentation. Our approach simultaneously reasons about pixels, regions and objects in a coherent probabilistic model. Pixel appearance features allow us to perform well on classifying amorphous background classes, while the explicit representation of regions facilitate the computation of more sophisticated features necessary for object detection. Importantly, our model gives a single unified description of the scene—we explain every pixel in the image and enforce global consistency between all random variables in our model. We run experiments on the challenging Street Scene dataset [2] and show significant improvement over state-of-the-art results for object detection accuracy.