Learning to Segment Object Candidates

TL;DR

This paper introduces a discriminative convolutional network for object proposal generation that produces high-recall, class-agnostic segmentation masks efficiently, outperforming existing methods without relying on low-level cues.

Contribution

A novel joint training approach for object proposals that combines segmentation and objectness scoring within a single discriminative network.

Findings

Significantly higher object recall with fewer proposals compared to state-of-the-art.

Effective generalization to unseen object categories.

No reliance on edges, superpixels, or low-level segmentation cues.

Abstract

Recent object detection systems rely on two critical steps: (1) a set of object proposals is predicted as efficiently as possible, and (2) this set of candidate proposals is then passed to an object classifier. Such approaches have been shown they can be fast, while achieving the state of the art in detection performance. In this paper, we propose a new way to generate object proposals, introducing an approach based on a discriminative convolutional network. Our model is trained jointly with two objectives: given an image patch, the first part of the system outputs a class-agnostic segmentation mask, while the second part of the system outputs the likelihood of the patch being centered on a full object. At test time, the model is efficiently applied on the whole test image and generates a set of segmentation masks, each of them being assigned with a corresponding object likelihood score. We show that our model yields significant improvements over state-of-the-art object proposal algorithms. In particular, compared to previous approaches, our model obtains substantially higher object recall using fewer proposals. We also show that our model is able to generalize to unseen categories it has not seen during training. Unlike all previous approaches for generating object masks, we do not rely on edges, superpixels, or any other form of low-level segmentation.