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Weakly Supervised Learning of Object Segmentations from Web-Scale Video

Glenn Hartmann
Judy Hoffman
David Tsai
Omid Madani
James Rehg
ECCV'12 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Computer Vision - Volume Part I, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg (2012), pp. 198-208

Abstract

We propose to learn pixel-level segmentations of objects from weakly labeled (tagged) internet videos. Specifically, given a large collection of raw YouTube content, along with potentially noisy tags, our goal is to automatically generate spatiotemporal masks for each object, such as "dog", without employing any pre-trained object detectors. We formulate this problem as learning weakly supervised classifiers for a set of independent spatio-temporal segments. The object seeds obtained using segment-level classifiers are further refined using graphcuts to generate high-precision object masks. Our results, obtained by training on a dataset of 20,000 YouTube videos weakly tagged into 15 classes, demonstrate automatic extraction of pixel-level object masks. Evaluated against a ground-truthed subset of 50,000 frames with pixel-level annotations, we confirm that our proposed methods can learn good object masks just by watching YouTube.