InSeGAN: A Generative Approach to Segmenting Identical Instances in Depth Images

TL;DR

InSeGAN is an unsupervised 3D GAN that synthesizes and segments multiple nearly identical object instances in depth images, enabling effective instance segmentation without labeled data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel GAN architecture with an analysis-by-synthesis approach for unsupervised segmentation of identical objects in depth images.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance on synthetic and real data.

Outperforms prior methods by large margins.

Introduces a new synthetic dataset, Insta-10.

Abstract

In this paper, we present InSeGAN, an unsupervised 3D generative adversarial network (GAN) for segmenting (nearly) identical instances of rigid objects in depth images. Using an analysis-by-synthesis approach, we design a novel GAN architecture to synthesize a multiple-instance depth image with independent control over each instance. InSeGAN takes in a set of code vectors (e.g., random noise vectors), each encoding the 3D pose of an object that is represented by a learned implicit object template. The generator has two distinct modules. The first module, the instance feature generator, uses each encoded pose to transform the implicit template into a feature map representation of each object instance. The second module, the depth image renderer, aggregates all of the single-instance feature maps output by the first module and generates a multiple-instance depth image. A discriminator distinguishes the generated multiple-instance depth images from the distribution of true depth images. To use our model for instance segmentation, we propose an instance pose encoder that learns to take in a generated depth image and reproduce the pose code vectors for all of the object instances. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new synthetic dataset, "Insta-10", consisting of 100,000 depth images, each with 5 instances of an object from one of 10 classes. Our experiments on Insta-10, as well as on real-world noisy depth images, show that InSeGAN achieves state-of-the-art performance, often outperforming prior methods by large margins.