Learning Hierarchical Features for Scene Labeling

Clément Farabet (1, 2) , Camille Couprie (2) , Laurent Najman (1) , Yann Lecun (2)

1 LIGM - Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge
2 CIMS - Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences [New York]

Scene labeling consists in labeling each pixel in an image with the category of the object it belongs to. We propose a method that uses a multiscale convolutional network trained from raw pixels to extract dense feature vectors that encode regions of multiple sizes centered on each pixel. The method alleviates the need for engineered features, and produces a powerful representation that captures texture, shape and contextual information. We report results using multiple post-processing methods to produce the final labeling. Among those, we propose a technique to automatically retrieve, from a pool of segmentation components, an optimal set of components that best explain the scene; these components are arbitrary, e.g. they can be taken from a segmentation tree, or from any family of over-segmentations. The system yields record accuracies on the Sift Flow Dataset (33 classes) and the Barcelona Dataset (170 classes) and near-record accuracy on Stanford Background Dataset (8 classes), while being an order of magnitude faster than competing approaches, producing a 320 × 240 image labeling in less than a second, including feature extraction.

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Clément Farabet, Camille Couprie, Laurent Najman, Yann Lecun. Learning Hierarchical Features for Scene Labeling. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2013, 35 (8), pp.1915 - 1929. ⟨10.1109/TPAMI.2012.231⟩. ⟨hal-00742077⟩