Unsupervised video object segmentation: An affinity and edge learning approach.

Abstract

<div>This paper presents a new approach to solve unsupervised video object segmentation~(UVOS) problem (called TMNet). The UVOS is still a challenging problem as prior methods suffer from issues like generalization errors to segment multiple objects in unseen test videos (category agnostic), over reliance on inaccurate optic flow, and problem towards capturing fine details at object boundaries. These issues make the UVOS, particularly in presence of multiple objects, an ill-defined problem. Our focus is to constrain the problem and improve the segmentation results by inclusion of multiple available cues such as appearance, motion, image edge, flow edge and tracking information through neural attention. To solve the challenging category agnostic multiple object UVOS, our model is designed to predict neighbourhood affinities for being part of the same object and cluster those to obtain accurate segmentation. To achieve multi cue based neural attention, we designed a Temporal Motion Attention module, as part of our segmentation framework, to learn the spatio-temporal features. To refine and improve the accuracy of object segmentation boundaries, an edge refinement module (using image and optic flow edges) and a geometry based loss function are incorporated. The overall framework is capable of segmenting and finding accurate objects' boundaries without any heuristic post processing. This enables the method to be used for unseen videos. Experimental results on challenging DAVIS16 and multi object DAVIS17 datasets shows that our proposed TMNet performs favourably compared to the state-of-the-art methods without post processing.</div>