Situational Object Boundary Detection
This work addresses the challenge of varying object boundary appearances in images for computer vision applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of object boundary detection by proposing a situational approach that trains specialized detectors for different image contexts, showing significant improvements over monolithic methods on ImageNet, COCO, and Pascal VOC 2012 datasets.
Intuitively, the appearance of true object boundaries varies from image to image. Hence the usual monolithic approach of training a single boundary predictor and applying it to all images regardless of their content is bound to be suboptimal. In this paper we therefore propose situational object boundary detection: We first define a variety of situations and train a specialized object boundary detector for each of them using [Dollar and Zitnick 2013]. Then given a test image, we classify it into these situations using its context, which we model by global image appearance. We apply the corresponding situational object boundary detectors, and fuse them based on the classification probabilities. In experiments on ImageNet, Microsoft COCO, and Pascal VOC 2012 segmentation we show that our situational object boundary detection gives significant improvements over a monolithic approach. Additionally, our method substantially outperforms [Hariharan et al. 2011] on semantic contour detection on their SBD dataset.