text: It is well accepted that image segmentation can benefit from utilizing multilevel cues. The paper focuses on utilizing the FCNN-based dense semantic predictions in the bottom-up image segmentation, arguing to take semantic cues into account from the very beginning. By this we can avoid merging regions of similar appearance but distinct semantic categories as possible. The semantic inefficiency problem is handled. We also propose a straightforward way to use the contour cues to suppress the noise in multilevel cues, thus to improve the segmentation robustness. The evaluation on the BSDS500 shows that we obtain the competitive region and boundary performance. Furthermore, since all individual regions can be assigned with appropriate semantic labels during the computation, we are capable of extracting the adjusted semantic segmentations. The experiment on Pascal VOC 2012 shows our improvement to the original semantic segmentations which derives directly from the dense predictions.
  @cite_46: Given that natural image segmentation is well-known as an ill-posed problem, then how can we design an algorithm to obtain good performance as human subjects? A choice is to learn from human segmentations as MCG [3] which obtains the state-of-the-art performance and fairly high computational efficiency. Then a question arises here: what should we learn? The way all existing literatures exploit human segmentations ignores a basic fact that human segmentations are produced by human operations. The human segmentation process would inevitably fulfill the human behavior’s principles including the least effort principle (LEP): a human will strive to solve his problem in such a way as to minimize the total work that he must expend [1]. The principle gives us a new insight into our problem. Suppose you are a human subject in the BSDS segmentation experiment, and are required to segment images into pieces under the ending instruction: each piece contains only one single distinguished thing. Then your total effort F of segmenting an image should including understanding images (U) to guide following operations, and tracing boundaries (T ) by hands with a mouse: F (I,S) =U (I)+T (S). Then from the viewpoint of LEP, human subjects would like to find an acceptable segmentation S by minimizing their effort, or formally,
  @cite_48: This paper investigates two fundamental problems in computer vision: contour detection and image segmentation. We present state-of-the-art algorithms for both of these tasks. Our contour detector combines multiple local cues into a globalization framework based on spectral clustering. Our segmentation algorithm consists of generic machinery for transforming the output of any contour detector into a hierarchical region tree. In this manner, we reduce the problem of image segmentation to that of contour detection. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that both our contour detection and segmentation methods significantly outperform competing algorithms. The automatically generated hierarchical segmentations can be interactively refined by user-specified annotations. Computation at multiple image resolutions provides a means of coupling our system to recognition applications.
  @cite_27: We propose a unified approach for bottom-up hierarchical image segmentation and object candidate generation for recognition, called Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping (MCG). For this purpose, we first develop a fast normalized cuts algorithm. We then propose a high-performance hierarchical segmenter that makes effective use of multiscale information. Finally, we propose a grouping strategy that combines our multiscale regions into highly-accurate object candidates by exploring efficiently their combinatorial space. We conduct extensive experiments on both the BSDS500 and on the PASCAL 2012 segmentation datasets, showing that MCG produces state-of-the-art contours, hierarchical regions and object candidates.
summary: In the bottom-up merging segmentation approaches @cite_48 @cite_27 , it is beneficial to use contour cues learned from human annotations. Then rather than treating human segmentations as only static samples, what other stuff can we learn? In @cite_46 , it is noticed that although human segmentations are of the high quality, there are surprisingly many boundary mistakes, even in the renown BSDS500 dataset, see Fig. .a-b. Easy to see, these mistakes are made intentionally instead of by casual operations.