text: Object segmentation requires both object-level information and low-level pixel data. This presents a challenge for feedforward networks: lower layers in convolutional nets capture rich spatial information, while upper layers encode object-level knowledge but are invariant to factors such as pose and appearance. In this work we propose to augment feedforward nets for object segmentation with a novel top-down refinement approach. The resulting bottom-up top-down architecture is capable of efficiently generating high-fidelity object masks. Similarly to skip connections, our approach leverages features at all layers of the net. Unlike skip connections, our approach does not attempt to output independent predictions at each layer. Instead, we first output a coarse mask encoding' in a feedforward pass, then refine this mask encoding in a top-down pass utilizing features at successively lower layers. The approach is simple, fast, and effective. Building on the recent DeepMask network for generating object proposals, we show accuracy improvements of 10-20 in average recall for various setups. Additionally, by optimizing the overall network architecture, our approach, which we call SharpMask, is 50 faster than the original DeepMask network (under .8s per image).
  @cite_35: 
  @cite_15: We propose a novel semantic segmentation algorithm by learning a deconvolution network. We learn the network on top of the convolutional layers adopted from VGG 16-layer net. The deconvolution network is composed of deconvolution and unpooling layers, which identify pixel-wise class labels and predict segmentation masks. We apply the trained network to each proposal in an input image, and construct the final semantic segmentation map by combining the results from all proposals in a simple manner. The proposed algorithm mitigates the limitations of the existing methods based on fully convolutional networks by integrating deep deconvolution network and proposal-wise prediction; our segmentation method typically identifies detailed structures and handles objects in multiple scales naturally. Our network demonstrates outstanding performance in PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, and we achieve the best accuracy (72.5 ) among the methods trained with no external data through ensemble with the fully convolutional network.
  @cite_23: We present an integrated framework for using Convolutional Networks for classification, localization and detection. We show how a multiscale and sliding window approach can be efficiently implemented within a ConvNet. We also introduce a novel deep learning approach to localization by learning to predict object boundaries. Bounding boxes are then accumulated rather than suppressed in order to increase detection confidence. We show that different tasks can be learned simultaneously using a single shared network. This integrated framework is the winner of the localization task of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013 (ILSVRC2013) and obtained very competitive results for the detection and classifications tasks. In post-competition work, we establish a new state of the art for the detection task. Finally, we release a feature extractor from our best model called OverFeat.
summary: @cite_35 proposed to invert the pooling process in a CNN to generate progressively higher resolution input images by storing the switch' variables from the pooling operation. Deconv networks have recently been applied successfully to semantic segmentation @cite_15 . Deconv layers share similarities with our refinement module, however, switches' are communicated instead of the feature values, which limits the information that can be transferred. Finally, @cite_23 proposed to progressively increase the resolution of an optical flow map. This can be seen as a special case of our refinement approach where: (1) the features' for refinement are set to be the flow field itself, (2) no feature transform is applied to the bottom-up features, and (3) the approach is applied monolithically to the entire image. Restricting our method in any of these ways would cause it to fail in our setting as discussed in .