Iterative Instance Segmentation

Ke Li, Bharath Hariharan, Jitendra Malik; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 3659-3667

Existing methods for pixel-wise labelling tasks generally disregard the underlying structure of labellings, often leading to predictions that are visually implausible. While incorporating structure into the model should improve prediction quality, doing so is challenging - manually specifying the form of structural constraints may be impractical and inference often becomes intractable even if structural constraints are given. We sidestep this problem by reducing structured prediction to a sequence of unconstrained prediction problems and demonstrate that this approach is capable of automatically discovering priors on shape, contiguity of region predictions and smoothness of region contours from data without any a priori specification. On the instance segmentation task, this method outperforms the state-of-the-art, achieving a mean AP^r of 63.6% at 50% overlap and 43.3% at 70% overlap.