Zankl, G. M. (2012). Semi-automatic annotation on image segmentation hierarchies [Diploma Thesis, Technische Universität Wien]. reposiTUm. https://resolver.obvsg.at/urn:nbn:at:at-ubtuw:1-48478
In the field of object recognition in natural images, a variety of established tasks exist, which are focus of attention when it comes to comparing different methods, for example image seg- mentation, semantic image segmentation or object detection. Image segmentation is the task of grouping pixels in an image that belong to the same region or object. Semantic image seg- mentation is the task of assigning a semantic label to each pixel of the image. The semantic labels can be objects: for example car, person, building; or classes of areas in an image: sky, floor, vertical surface. Object detection is the task of predicting occurrence and position in an image, for example by determining a bounding box of the object. Traditional object recognition challenges have limitations such as ambiguity in more general contexts.<br />For example for a sin- gle natural image, there are often multiple image segmentations a human would consider to be correct, depending on the object that person is particularly interested in. We raise the question:<br />"Is there a different task, that overcomes these limitations?" As an example we propose the task of interactively assigning a semantic label to each segment of a segmentation hierarchy. The result can be represented as a stack of semantic segmentations, with an inclusion-relationship between segments of adjacent segmentations. The focus of this work is to provide a solution to this task and discuss advantages and problems that arise. The main disadvantage is that it is harder to obtain suitable ground-truth that consists of annotated segmentation hierarchies. Also the quality of underlying segmentation methods is, in general, sub-optimal for natural images. The main advantage is that the structure implied by the occurrence of labels in the ground-truth can be used to aid the user in labeling the segments of the hierarchy. We propose a framework that consists of a feedback loop, where a label prediction is provided by the framework and a human user may select one or more misclassified segments and assign the correct label. This process can be repeated until the user is satisfied. The prediction is done using a Conditional Random Field (CRF) that is modified so that we are able to condition the model on the segmen- tation hierarchy as well as the user input. The framework is evaluated on two distinct datasets by comparing its quality to a straight-forward baseline. The baseline consists of a single prediction step of the proposed framework followed by fully manual correction of the segments without new predictions. The results show a significant difference in quality, after several user inter- actions. For example after 20 user interactions the baseline adjusts 20 misclassified segments, while the CRF-based framework adjusts about 130 misclassified segments for the two datasets. This experiment illustrates the potential of structured prediction for the proposed task.