Discovering Objects That Can Move

Zhipeng Bao, Pavel Tokmakov, Allan Jabri, Yu-Xiong Wang, Adrien Gaidon, Martial Hebert; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 11789-11798

Abstract


This paper studies the problem of object discovery -- separating objects from the background without manual labels. Existing approaches utilize appearance cues, such as color, texture, and location, to group pixels into object-like regions. However, by relying on appearance alone, these methods fail to separate objects from the background in cluttered scenes. This is a fundamental limitation since the definition of an object is inherently ambiguous and context-dependent. To resolve this ambiguity, we choose to focus on dynamic objects -- entities that can move independently in the world. We then scale the recent auto-encoder based frameworks for unsupervised object discovery from toy synthetic images to complex real-world scenes. To this end, we simplify their architecture, and augment the resulting model with a weak learning signal from general motion segmentation algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate that, despite only capturing a small subset of the objects that move, this signal is enough to generalize to segment both moving and static instances of dynamic objects. We show that our model scales to a newly collected, photo-realistic synthetic dataset with street driving scenarios. Additionally, we leverage ground truth segmentation and flow annotations in this dataset for thorough ablation and evaluation. Finally, our experiments on the real-world KITTI benchmark demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms both heuristic- and learning-based methods by capitalizing on motion cues.

Related Material


[pdf] [supp] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Bao_2022_CVPR, author = {Bao, Zhipeng and Tokmakov, Pavel and Jabri, Allan and Wang, Yu-Xiong and Gaidon, Adrien and Hebert, Martial}, title = {Discovering Objects That Can Move}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}, month = {June}, year = {2022}, pages = {11789-11798} }