Object proposal by multi-branch hierarchical segmentation

Hierarchical segmentation based object proposal methods have become an important step in modern object detection paradigm. However, standard single-way hierarchical methods are fundamentally flawed in that the errors in early steps cannot be corrected and accumulate. In this work, we propose a novel multi-branch hierarchical segmentation approach that alleviates such problems by learning multiple merging strategies in each step in a complementary manner, such that errors in one merging strategy could be corrected by the others. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both object proposal and object detection tasks, comparing to previous object proposal methods.