Unsupervised Multiclass Region Cosegmentation via Ensemble Clustering and Energy Minimization

The problem of unsupervised segmentation of multi-class regions can be significantly boosted when they irregularly recur in multiple images. The existing segmentation methods are either weakly supervised, such as tagging images with object classes, or are limited by the assumption that each image contains all the object instances. In this paper, we propose a new method to cosegment multiclass regions from a group of images without the assumption about object configurations. The key idea is to discover the unknown object-like proposals via a robust ensemble clustering scheme. The proposals are then used to derive unary and pairwise energy potentials across all the images, which can be minimized with the α-expansion. Experimental evaluation on a number of image groups demonstrates the good performance of the proposed method on the multiclass region cosegmentation.