Unsupervised multi-class joint image segmentation

Joint segmentation of image sets is a challenging problem, especially when there are multiple objects with variable appearance shared among the images in the collection and the set of objects present in each particular image is itself varying and unknown. In this paper, we present a novel method to jointly segment a set of images containing objects from multiple classes. We first establish consistent functional maps across the input images, and introduce a formulation that explicitly models partial similarity across images instead of global consistency. Given the optimized maps between pairs of images, multiple groups of consistent segmentation functions are found such that they align with segmentation cues in the images, agree with the functional maps, and are mutually exclusive. The proposed fully unsupervised approach exhibits a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods, as shown on the co-segmentation data sets MSRC, Flickr, and PASCAL.