Part Discovery from Partial Correspondence

Subhransu Maji, Gregory Shakhnarovich; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 931-938

We study the problem of part discovery when partial correspondence between instances of a category are available. For visual categories that exhibit high diversity in structure such as buildings, our approach can be used to discover parts that are hard to name, but can be easily expressed as a correspondence between pairs of images. Parts naturally emerge from point-wise landmark matches across many instances within a category. We propose a learning framework for automatic discovery of parts in such weakly supervised settings, and show the utility of the rich part library learned in this way for three tasks: object detection, category-specific saliency estimation, and fine-grained image parsing.