Multi-instance object segmentation with occlusion handling

We present a multi-instance object segmentation algorithm to tackle occlusions. As an object is split into two parts by an occluder, it is nearly impossible to group the two separate regions into an instance by purely bottomup schemes. To address this problem, we propose to incorporate top-down category specific reasoning and shape prediction through exemplars into an intuitive energy minimization framework. We perform extensive evaluations of our method on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation set. The proposed algorithm achieves favorable results on the joint detection and segmentation task against the state-of-the-art method both quantitatively and qualitatively.