Multi-cue Mid-level Grouping

Region proposal methods provide richer object hypotheses than sliding windows with dramatically fewer proposals, yet they still number in the thousands. This large quantity of proposals typically results from a diversification step that propagates bottom-up ambiguity in the form of proposals to the next processing stage. In this paper, we take a complementary approach in which mid-level knowledge is used to resolve bottom-up ambiguity at an earlier stage to allow a further reduction in the number of proposals. We present a method for generating regions using the mid-level grouping cues of closure and symmetry. In doing so, we combine mid-level cues that are typically used only in isolation, and leverage them to produce fewer but higher quality proposals. We emphasize that our model is mid-level by learning it on a limited number of objects while applying it to different objects, thus demonstrating that it is transferable to other objects. In our quantitative evaluation, we 1) establish the usefulness of each grouping cue by demonstrating incremental improvement, and 2) demonstrate improvement on two leading region proposal methods with a limited budget of proposals.