Partial Supervision and latent variable models for semantic image segmentation

Semantic image segmentation is the task of assigning semantic labels to the pixels of a natural image. It is an important step towards general scene understanding and has lately received much attention in the computer vision community. It was found that detailed annotation of images are helpful for solving this task, but obtaining accurate and consistent annotations still proves to be difficult on a large scale. One possible way forward is to work with partial supervision and latent variable models to infer semantic annotations from the data during training.

The talk will present two approaches working with partial supervision for image segmentation. The first uses an efficient multi-instance formulation to obtain object class segmentations when trained on class labels alone. The second uses a latent CRF formulation to extract object parts based on object class segmentation.