Multi-View Saliency-Guided Clustering for Image Cosegmentation

Image cosegmentation aims at extracting the common objects from multiple images simultaneously. Existing methods mainly solve cosegmentation via the pre-defined graph, which lacks flexibility and robustness to handle various visual patterns. Besides, similar backgrounds also confuse the identification of the common foreground. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-view saliency-guided clustering algorithm (MvSGC) for the image cosegmentation task. In our model, the unsupervised saliency prior is used as partition-level side information to guide the foreground clustering process. To achieve robustness to noises and missing observations, similarities on an instance-level and the partition-level are both considered. Specifically, a unified clustering model with cosine similarity is proposed to capture the intrinsic structure of data and keep the partition result consistent with the side information. Moreover, we leverage multi-view weight learning to integrate multiple feature representations to further improve the robustness of our approach. A K-means-like optimization algorithm is developed to proceed the constrained clustering in a highly efficient way with theoretical support. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets (i.e., the iCoseg, MSRC, and Internet image dataset) and one RGB-D image dataset demonstrate the superiority of applying our clustering method for image cosegmentation.