Co-segmentation by Composition

Alon Faktor, Michal Irani; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 1297-1304

Given a set of images which share an object from the same semantic category, we would like to co-segment the shared object. We define 'good' co-segments to be ones which can be easily composed (like a puzzle) from large pieces of other co-segments, yet are difficult to compose from remaining image parts. These pieces must not only match well but also be statistically significant (hard to compose at random). This gives rise to co-segmentation of objects in very challenging scenarios with large variations in appearance, shape and large amounts of clutter. We further show how multiple images can collaborate and "score" each others' co-segments to improve the overall fidelity and accuracy of the co-segmentation. Our co-segmentation can be applied both to large image collections, as well as to very few images (where there is too little data for unsupervised learning). At the extreme, it can be applied even to a single image, to extract its co-occurring objects. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets. We further show very encouraging co-segmentation results on the challenging PASCAL-VOC dataset.