Unconstrained Foreground Object Search

Yinan Zhao, Brian Price, Scott Cohen, Danna Gurari; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 2030-2039

Many people search for foreground objects to use when editing images. While existing methods can retrieve candidates to aid in this, they are constrained to returning objects that belong to a pre-specified semantic class. We instead propose a novel problem of unconstrained foreground object (UFO) search and introduce a solution that supports efficient search by encoding the background image in the same latent space as the candidate foreground objects. A key contribution of our work is a cost-free, scalable approach for creating a large-scale training dataset with a variety of foreground objects of differing semantic categories per image location. Quantitative and human-perception experiments with two diverse datasets demonstrate the advantage of our UFO search solution over related baselines.