The perceptual-based grouping process produces a hierarchical and compositional image representation that helps both human and machine vision systems recognize heterogeneous visual concepts. Examples can be found in the classical hierarchical superpixel segmentation or image parsing works. However, the grouping process is largely overlooked in modern CNN-based image segmentation networks due to many challenges, including the inherent incompatibility between the grid-shaped CNN feature map and the irregular-shaped perceptual grouping hierarchy. Overcoming these challenges, we propose a deep grouping model (DGM) that tightly marries the two types of representations and defines a bottom-up and a top-down process for feature exchanging. When evaluating the model on the recent Broden+ dataset for the unified perceptual parsing task, it achieves state-of-the-art results while having a small computational overhead compared to other contextual-based segmentation models. Furthermore, the DGM has better interpretability compared with modern CNN methods.
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
To address the challenging task of instance-aware human part parsing, a new bottom-up regime is proposed to learn category-level human semantic segmentation as well as multi-person pose estimation in a joint and end-to-end manner. It is a compact, efficient and powerful framework that exploits structural information over different human granularities and eases the difficulty of person partitioning. Specifically, a dense-to-sparse projection field, which allows explicitly associating dense human semantics with sparse keypoints, is learnt and progressively improved over the network feature pyram…
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学电气与信息工程学院）
Multi-human parsing aims to segment every body part of every human instance. Nearly all state-of-the-art methods follow the "detection first" or "segmentation first" pipelines. Different from them, we present an end-to-end and box-free pipeline from a new and more human-intuitive perspective. In training time, we directly do instance segmentation on humans and parts. More specifically, we introduce a notion of "indiscriminate objects with categorie" which treats humans and parts without distinction and regards them both as instances with categories. In the mask prediction, each binary mask is …
Ecole Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Distributed synchronization is known to occur at several scales in the brain, and has been suggested as playing a key functional role in perceptual grouping. State-of-the-art visual grouping algorithms, however, seem to give comparatively little attention to neural synchronization analogies. Based on the framework of concurrent synchronization of dynamic systems, simple networks of neural oscillators coupled with diffusive connections are proposed to solve visual grouping problems. Multi-layer algorithms and feedback mechanisms are also studied. The same algorithm is shown to achieve promising…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
In this work we aim to develop a universal sketch grouper. That is, a grouper that can be applied to sketches of any category in any domain to group constituent strokes/segments into semantically meaningful object parts. The first obstacle to this goal is the lack of large-scale datasets with grouping annotation. To overcome this, we contribute the largest sketch perceptual grouping (SPG) dataset to date, consisting of 20,000 unique sketches evenly distributed over 25 object categories. Furthermore, we propose a novel deep universal perceptual grouping model. The model is learned with both gen…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；SenseTime Group (Limited)（商汤集团有限公司）；CVTE Research（视源研究院）
Instance-level human parsing towards real-world human analysis scenarios is still under-explored due to the absence of sufficient data resources and technical difficulty in parsing multiple instances in a single pass. Several related works all follow the "parsing-by-detection" pipeline that heavily relies on separately trained detection models to localize instances and then performs human parsing for each instance sequentially. Nonetheless, two discrepant optimization targets of detection and parsing lead to suboptimal representation learning and error accumulation for final results. In this w…
Humans recognize the visual world at multiple levels: we effortlessly categorize scenes and detect objects inside, while also identifying the textures and surfaces of the objects along with their different compositional parts. In this paper, we study a new task called Unified Perceptual Parsing, which requires the machine vision systems to recognize as many visual concepts as possible from a given image. A multi-task framework called UPerNet and a training strategy are developed to learn from heterogeneous image annotations. We benchmark our framework on Unified Perceptual Parsing and show tha…
Work at the intersection of vision science and deep learning is starting to explore the efficacy of deep convolutional networks (DCNs) and recurrent networks in solving perceptual grouping problems that underlie primate visual recognition and segmentation. Here, we extend this line of work to investigate the compactness and generalizability of DCN solutions to learning low-level perceptual grouping routines involving contour integration. We introduce V1Net, a bio-inspired recurrent unit that incorporates lateral connections ubiquitous in cortical circuitry. Feedforward convolutional layers in …
This fourth and last tome is focusing on describing the envisioned works for a project that has been presented in the preceding tome. It is about a new approach dedicated to the coding of still and moving pictures, trying to bridge the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standard bodies. The aim of this project is to define the principles of self-descriptive video coding. In order to establish them, the document is composed in five chapters that describe the various envisioned techniques for developing such a new approach in visual coding: - image segmentation, - computation of visual descriptors, - computation…
Region-based artificial attention constitutes a framework for bio-inspired attentional processes on an intermediate abstraction level for the use in computer vision and mobile robotics. Segmentation algorithms produce regions of coherently colored pixels. These serve as proto-objects on which the attentional processes determine image portions of relevance. A single region---which not necessarily represents a full object---constitutes the focus of attention. For many post-attentional tasks, however, such as identifying or tracking objects, single segments are not sufficient. Here, we present a …
This paper presents a novel real-time method for tracking salient closed boundaries from video image sequences. This method operates on a set of straight line segments that are produced by line detection. The tracking scheme is coherently integrated into a perceptual grouping framework in which the visual tracking problem is tackled by identifying a subset of these line segments and connecting them sequentially to form a closed boundary with the largest saliency and a certain similarity to the previous one. Specifically, we define a new tracking criterion which combines a grouping cost and an …
Image segmentation is an important component of many image understanding systems. It aims to group pixels in a spatially and perceptually coherent manner. Typically, these algorithms have a collection of parameters that control the degree of over-segmentation produced. It still remains a challenge to properly select such parameters for human-like perceptual grouping. In this work, we exploit the diversity of segments produced by different choices of parameters. We scan the segmentation parameter space and generate a collection of image segmentation hypotheses (from highly over-segmented to und…
Recently, a considerable number of studies in computer vision involves deep neural architectures called vision transformers. Visual processing in these models incorporates computational models that are claimed to implement attention mechanisms. Despite an increasing body of work that attempts to understand the role of attention mechanisms in vision transformers, their effect is largely unknown. Here, we asked if the attention mechanisms in vision transformers exhibit similar effects as those known in human visual attention. To answer this question, we revisited the attention formulation in the…
Forming perceptual groups and individuating objects in visual scenes is an essential step towards visual intelligence. This ability is thought to arise in the brain from computations implemented by bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down connections between neurons. However, the relative contributions of these connections to perceptual grouping are poorly understood. We address this question by systematically evaluating neural network architectures featuring combinations bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down connections on two synthetic visual tasks, which stress low-level "Gestalt" vs. high-level o…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
This paper presents a novel approach for temporal and semantic segmentation of edited videos into meaningful segments, from the point of view of the storytelling structure. The objective is to decompose a long video into more manageable sequences, which can in turn be used to retrieve the most significant parts of it given a textual query and to provide an effective summarization. Previous video decomposition methods mainly employed perceptual cues, tackling the problem either as a story change detection, or as a similarity grouping task, and the lack of semantics limited their ability to iden…
College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University（弗林德斯大学科学与工程学院）
Why does our visual system fail to reconstruct reality, when we look at certain patterns? Where do Geometrical illusions start to emerge in the visual pathway? How far should we take computational models of vision with the same visual ability to detect illusions as we do? This study addresses these questions, by focusing on a specific underlying neural mechanism involved in our visual experiences that affects our final perception. Among many types of visual illusion, Geometrical and, in particular, Tilt Illusions are rather important, being characterized by misperception of geometric patterns …
The Curious AI Company（The Curious AI公司）；IDSIA（人工智能研究所）
We present a framework for efficient perceptual inference that explicitly reasons about the segmentation of its inputs and features. Rather than being trained for any specific segmentation, our framework learns the grouping process in an unsupervised manner or alongside any supervised task. By enriching the representations of a neural network, we enable it to group the representations of different objects in an iterative manner. By allowing the system to amortize the iterative inference of the groupings, we achieve very fast convergence. In contrast to many other recently proposed methods for …
Discrete undirected graphical models, also known as Markov Random Fields (MRFs), can flexibly encode probabilistic interactions of multiple variables, and have enjoyed successful applications to a wide range of problems. However, a well-known yet little studied limitation of discrete MRFs is that they cannot capture context-specific independence (CSI). Existing methods require carefully developed theories and purpose-built inference methods, which limit their applications to only small-scale problems. In this paper, we propose the Markov Attention Model (MAM), a family of discrete MRFs that in…
Humans are excellent at perceiving illusory outlines. We are readily able to complete contours, shapes, scenes, and even unseen objects when provided with images that contain broken fragments of a connected appearance. In vision science, this ability is largely explained by perceptual grouping: a foundational set of processes in human vision that describes how separated elements can be grouped. In this paper, we revisit an algorithm called Stochastic Completion Fields (SCFs) that mechanizes a set of such processes -- good continuity, closure, and proximity -- through contour completion. This p…
Selection functionality is as fundamental to vector graphics as it is for raster data. But vector selection is quite different: instead of pixel-level labeling, we make a binary decision to include or exclude each vector primitive. In the absence of intelligible metadata, this becomes a perceptual grouping problem. These have previously relied on heuristics derived from empirical principles like Gestalt Theory, but since these are ill-defined and subjective, they often result in ambiguity. Here we take a data-centric approach to the problem. By exploiting the recursive nature of perceptual gro…
Locate n' Rotate: Two-stage Openable Part Detection with Foundation Model Priors
Ningbo innovation Center, Zhejiang University（浙江大学宁波创新中心）；College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院）；Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）
Hainan University（海南大学）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；City University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Research Institute（香港城市大学深圳研究院）
Stereo superpixel segmentation aims at grouping the discretizing pixels into perceptual regions through left and right views more collaboratively and efficiently. Existing superpixel segmentation algorithms mostly utilize color and spatial features as input, which may impose strong constraints on spatial information while utilizing the disparity information in terms of stereo image pairs. To alleviate this issue, we propose a stereo superpixel segmentation method with a decoupling mechanism of spatial information in this work. To decouple stereo disparity information and spatial information, t…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；National University of Defense Technology（中国人民解放军国防科技大学）；Qihoo 360 AI Institute（奇虎360人工智能研究院）
Despite the noticeable progress in perceptual tasks like detection, instance segmentation and human parsing, computers still perform unsatisfactorily on visually understanding humans in crowded scenes, such as group behavior analysis, person re-identification and autonomous driving, etc. To this end, models need to comprehensively perceive the semantic information and the differences between instances in a multi-human image, which is recently defined as the multi-human parsing task. In this paper, we present a new large-scale database "Multi-Human Parsing (MHP)" for algorithm development and e…
Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences)（齐鲁工业大学（山东省科学院））；Shandong Artificial Intelligence Institute（山东省人工智能研究院）；Shandong Cancer Hospital（山东省肿瘤医院）；Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences（山东省医学科学院）；Southeast University（东南大学）；University Paris Dauphine（巴黎第九大学）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；CEREMADE（决策数学研究中心）
Tubular structure tracking is a crucial task in the fields of computer vision and medical image analysis. The minimal paths-based approaches have exhibited their strong ability in tracing tubular structures, by which a tubular structure can be naturally modeled as a minimal geodesic path computed with a suitable geodesic metric. However, existing minimal paths-based tracing approaches still suffer from difficulties such as the shortcuts and short branches combination problems, especially when dealing with the images involving complicated tubular tree structures or background. In this paper, we…
Humans have the remarkable ability to perceive objects as a whole, even when parts of them are occluded. This ability of amodal perception forms the basis of our perceptual and cognitive understanding of our world. To enable robots to reason with this capability, we formulate and propose a novel task that we name amodal panoptic segmentation. The goal of this task is to simultaneously predict the pixel-wise semantic segmentation labels of the visible regions of stuff classes and the instance segmentation labels of both the visible and occluded regions of thing classes. To facilitate research o…
W-Net: A Facial Feature-Guided Face Super-Resolution Network
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学信息科学与工程学院）；Center for Optics Research and Engineering (CORE), Shandong University（山东大学光学研究与工程中心）
Pixel-Wise Symbol Spotting via Progressive Points Location for Parsing CAD Images
Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学信息技术学院）；Software Development Center, China Information Technology Designing and Consulting Institute Co., Ltd（中国电子工程设计院有限公司软件开发中心）
We introduce one-shot texture segmentation: the task of segmenting an input image containing multiple textures given a patch of a reference texture. This task is designed to turn the problem of texture-based perceptual grouping into an objective benchmark. We show that it is straight-forward to generate large synthetic data sets for this task from a relatively small number of natural textures. In particular, this task can be cast as a self-supervised problem thereby alleviating the need for massive amounts of manually annotated data necessary for traditional segmentation tasks. In this paper w…
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（英ception人工智能研究所）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Nvidia（英伟达）；University of California at Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient face deblurring algorithm by exploiting semantic cues via deep convolutional neural networks. As the human faces are highly structured and share unified facial components (e.g., eyes and mouths), such semantic information provides a strong prior for restoration. We incorporate face semantic labels as input priors and propose an adaptive structural loss to regularize facial local structures within an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network. Specifically, we first use a coarse deblurring network to reduce the motion blur on the input face…
