Unsupervised Multi-Class Co-Segmentation via Joint-Cut over L₁-Manifold Hyper-Graph of Discriminative Image Regions

This paper systematically advocates a robust and efficient unsupervised multi-class co-segmentation approach by leveraging underlying subspace manifold propagation to exploit the cross-image coherency. It can combat certain image co-segmentation difficulties due to viewpoint change, partial occlusion, complex background, transient illumination, and cluttering texture patterns. Our key idea is to construct a powerful hyper-graph joint-cut framework, which incorporates mid-level image regions-based intra-image feature representation and L₁-manifold graph-based inter-image coherency exploration. For local image region generation, we propose a bi-harmonic distance distribution difference metric to govern the super-pixel clustering in a bottom-up way. It not only affords drastic data reduction but also gives rise to discriminative and structure meaningful feature representation. As for the inter-image coherency, we leverage multi-type features involved L₁-graph to detect the underlying local manifold from cross-image regions. As a result, the implicit supervising information could be encoded into the unsupervised hyper-graph joint-cut framework. We conduct extensive experiments and make comprehensive evaluations with other state-of-the-art methods over various benchmarks, including iCoseg, MSRC, and Oxford flower. All the results demonstrate the superiorities of our method in terms of accuracy, robustness, efficiency, and versatility.