Nonparametric Scene Parsing via Label Transfer

While there has been a lot of recent work on object recognition and image understanding, the focus has been on carefully establishing mathematical models for images, scenes, and objects. In this chapter, we propose a novel, nonparametric approach for object recognition and scene parsing using a new technology we name label transfer. For an input image, our system first retrieves its nearest neighbors from a large database containing fully annotated images. Then, the system establishes dense correspondences between the input image and each of the nearest neighbors using the dense SIFT flow algorithm (Liu et al., 33(5):978–994, 2011 Chap. 2), which aligns two images based on local image structures. Finally, based on the dense scene correspondences obtained from the SIFT flow, our system warps the existing annotations, and integrates multiple cues in a Markov random field framework to segment and recognize the query image. Promising experimental results have been achieved by our nonparametric scene parsing system on challenging databases. Compared to existing object recognition approaches that require training classifiers or appearance models for each object category, our system is easy to implement, has few parameters, and embeds contextual information naturally in the retrieval/alignment procedure.