Abstract-Computer vision applications have come to rely increasingly on superpixels in recent years, but it is not always clear what constitutes a good superpixel algorithm. In an effort to understand the benefits and drawbacks of existing methods, we empirically compare five state-of-the-art superpixel algorithms for their ability to adhere to image boundaries, speed, memory efficiency, and their impact on segmentation performance. We then introduce a new superpixel algorithm, simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC), which adapts a k-means clustering approach to efficiently generate superpixels. Despite its simplicity, SLIC adheres to boundaries as well as or better than previous methods. At the same time, it is faster and more memory efficient, improves segmentation performance, and is straightforward to extend to supervoxel generation.

It has been shown that the 3D shape of a deformable surface in an image can be recovered by establishing correspondences between that image and a reference one in which the shape is known. These matches can then be used to setup a convex optimization problem in terms of the shape parameters, which is easily solved. However, in many cases, the correspondences are hard to establish reliably. In this paper, we show that we can solve simultaneously for both 3D shape and correspondences, thereby using 3D shape constraints to guide the image matching and increasing robustness, for example when the textures are repetitive. This involves solving a mixed integer quadratic problem. While optimizing this problem is NP-hard in general, we show that its solution can nevertheless be approximated effectively by a branch-and-bound algorithm.

No abstract

Most recent approaches to monocular nonrigid 3D shape recovery rely on exploiting point correspondences and work best when the whole surface is well textured. The alternative is to rely on either contours or shading information, which has only been demonstrated in very restrictive settings. Here, we propose a novel approach to monocular deformable shape recovery that can operate under complex lighting and handle partially textured surfaces. At the heart of our algorithm are a learned mapping from intensity patterns to the shape of local surface patches and a principled approach to piecing together the resulting local shape estimates. We validate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively using both synthetic and real data.

With the advent of social image-sharing communities, millions of images with associated semantic tags are now available online for free and allow us to exploit this abundant data in new ways. We present a fast non-parametric statistical framework designed to analyze a large data corpus of images and semantic tag pairs and find correspondences between image characteristics and semantic concepts. We learn the relevance of different image characteristics for thousands of keywords from one million annotated images. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness with three different examples of semantic image enhancement: we adapt the gray-level tone-mapping, emphasize semantically relevant colors, and perform a defocus magnification for an image based on its semantic context. The performance of our algorithms is validated with psychophysical experiments.