Doug Poland

Alexander Moore, Amar Saini, Kylie Cancilla et al.

Amodal segmentation and amodal content completion require using object priors to estimate occluded masks and features of objects in complex scenes. Until now, no data has provided an additional dimension for object context: the possibility of multiple cameras sharing a view of a scene. We introduce MOVi-MC-AC: Multiple Object Video with Multi-Cameras and Amodal Content, the largest amodal segmentation and first amodal content dataset to date. Cluttered scenes of generic household objects are simulated in multi-camera video. MOVi-MC-AC contributes to the growing literature of object detection, tracking, and segmentation by including two new contributions to the deep learning for computer vision world. Multiple Camera (MC) settings where objects can be identified and tracked between various unique camera perspectives are rare in both synthetic and real-world video. We introduce a new complexity to synthetic video by providing consistent object ids for detections and segmentations between both frames and multiple cameras each with unique features and motion patterns on a single scene. Amodal Content (AC) is a reconstructive task in which models predict the appearance of target objects through occlusions. In the amodal segmentation literature, some datasets have been released with amodal detection, tracking, and segmentation labels. While other methods rely on slow cut-and-paste schemes to generate amodal content pseudo-labels, they do not account for natural occlusions present in the modal masks. MOVi-MC-AC provides labels for ~5.8 million object instances, setting a new maximum in the amodal dataset literature, along with being the first to provide ground-truth amodal content. The full dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Amar-S/MOVi-MC-AC ,

Douglas Poland, Amar Saini

Perception of the visually disjoint surfaces of our cluttered world as whole objects, physically distinct from those overlapping them, is a cognitive phenomenon called objectness that forms the basis of our visual perception. Shared by all vertebrates and present at birth in humans, it enables object-centric representation and reasoning about the visual world. We present a computational approach to objectness that leverages motion cues and spatio-temporal attention using a pair of supervised spatio-temporal R(2+1)U-Nets. The first network detects motion boundaries and classifies the pixels at those boundaries in terms of their local foreground-background sense. This motion boundary sense (MBS) information is passed, along with a spatio-temporal object attention cue, to an attentional surface perception (ASP) module which infers the form of the attended object over a sequence of frames and classifies its 'pixels' as visible or obscured. The spatial form of the attention cue is flexible, but it must loosely track the attended object which need not be visible. We demonstrate the ability of this simple but novel approach to infer objectness from phenomenology without object models, and show that it delivers robust perception of individual attended objects in cluttered scenes, even with blur and camera shake. We show that our data diversity and augmentation minimizes bias and facilitates transfer to real video. Finally, we describe how this computational objectness capability can grow in sophistication and anchor a robust modular video object perception framework.