Co-segmentation via visualization

Abstract This paper addresses the co-segmentation problem using feature visualization for CNNs. Visualization is exploited as an auxiliary information to discriminate salient image regions (dubbed as “heat-regions”) from non-salient ones. Region occlusion sensitivity is proposed for feature visualization. The co-segmentation problem is formulated via a convex quadratic optimization which is initialized by the heat-regions. The information obtained through the visualization is considered as an extra energy term in the cost function. The results of the visualization demonstrate that there exist some heat-regions which are not productive in the co-segmentation. To detect helpful regions among them, an adaptive strategy in the form of an iterative algorithm is proposed according to the consistency among all images. Comparison experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets, iCoseg and MSRC, illustrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art algorithms.