Cascaded Classification Models: Combining Models for Holistic Scene Understanding

Summary: Holistic scene understanding requires solving several tasks simultaneously, including object detection, scene categorization, labeling of meaningful regions, and 3-d reconstruction. We develop a learning method that couples these individual sub-tasks for improving performance in each of them.

Abstract: One of the original goals of computer vision was to fully understand a natural scene. This requires solving several problems simultaneously, including object detection, labeling of meaningful regions, and 3d reconstruction. While great progress has been made in tackling each of these problems in isolation, only re- cently have researchers again been considering the difficult task of assembling various methods to the mutual benefit of all. We consider learning a set of such classification models in such a way that they both solve their own problem and help each other. We develop a framework called Cascaded Classification Mod- els (CCM), where repeated instantiations of these classifiers are coupled by their input/output variables in a cascade that improves performance at each level. Our method requires only a limited "black-box" interface with the models, allowing us to use very sophisticated, state-of-the-art classifiers without having to look under the hood. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a large set of nat- ural images by combining the subtasks of scene categorization, object detection, multiclass image segmentation, and 3d scene reconstruction.



Related project: Make3D.

Publications

Cascaded Classification Models: Combining Models for Holistic Scene Understanding, Geremy Heitz, Stephen Gould, Ashutosh Saxena, Daphne Koller. In Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2008. (full oral) [pdf]

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