Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of generating possible object locations for use in object recognition. We introduce selective search which combines the strength of both an exhaustive search and segmentation. Like segmentation, we use the image structure to guide our sampling process. Like exhaustive search, we aim to capture all possible object locations. Instead of a single technique to generate possible object locations, we diversify our search and use a variety of complementary image partitionings to deal with as many image conditions as possible. Our selective search results in a small set of data-driven, class-independent, high quality locations, yielding 99 % recall and a Mean Average Best Overlap of 0.879 at 10,097 locations. The reduced number of locations compared to an exhaustive search enables the use of stronger machine learning techniques and stronger appearance models for object recognition. In this paper we show that our selective search enables the use of the powerful Bag-of-Words model for recognition. The selective search software is made publicly available (Software: http://disi.unitn.it/~uijlings/SelectiveSearch.html).
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Alexe, B., Deselaers, T., Ferrari, V. (2010). What is an object? In CVPR.
Alexe, B., Deselaers, T., & Ferrari, V. (2012). Measuring the objectness of image windows. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 34(11), 2189–2202.
Arbeláez, P., Maire, M., Fowlkes, C., & Malik, J. (2011). Contour detection and hierarchical image segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 33(5), 898–916.
Carreira, J., Sminchisescu, C. (2010). Constrained parametric min-cuts for automatic object segmentation. In CVPR.
Chum, O., Zisserman, A. (2007). An exemplar model for learning object classes. In CVPR.
Comaniciu, D., & Meer, P. (2002). Mean shift: A robust approach toward feature space analysis. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 24, 603–619.
Csurka, G., Dance, C. R., Fan, L., Willamowski, J., & Bray, C. (2004). In ECCV statistical learning in computer vision: Visual categorization with bags of keypoints.
Dalal, N., Triggs, B. (2005). Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection. In CVPR.
Endres, I., Hoiem, D. (2010). Category independent object proposals. In ECCV.
Everingham, M., Gool, L. V., Williams, C., Winn, J., & Zisserman, A. (2011). The Pascal visual object classes challenge workshop: Overview and results of the detection challenge.
Everingham, M., van Gool, L., Williams, C. K. I., Winn, J., & Zisserman, A. (2010). The Pascal visual object classes (voc) challenge. International Journal of Computer Vision, 88, 303–338.
Felzenszwalb, P. F., Girshick, R. B., McAllester, D., & Ramanan, D. (2010). Object detection with discriminatively trained part based models. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 32, 1627–1645.
Felzenszwalb, P. F., & Huttenlocher, D. P. (2004). Efficient graph-based image segmentation. International Journal of Computer Vision, 59, 167–181.
Geusebroek, J. M., van den Boomgaard, R., Smeulders, A. W. M., & Geerts, H. (2001). Color invariance. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 23, 1338–1350.
Gu, C., Lim, J. J., Arbeláez, P., & Malik, J. (2009). In CVPR: Recognition using regions.
Harzallah, H., Jurie, F., & Schmid, C. (2009). In ICCV: Combining efficient object localization and image classification.
Lampert, C. H., Blaschko, M. B., & Hofmann, T. (2009). Efficient subwindow search: A branch and bound framework for object localization. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 31, 2129–2142.
Lazebnik, S., Schmid, C., Ponce, J. (2006). Beyond bags of features: Spatial pyramid matching for recognizing natural scene categories. In CVPR.
Li, F., & Carreira, J., Sminchisescu, C. (2010). In CVPR: Object recognition as ranking holistic figure-ground hypotheses.
Liu, C., Sharan, L., Adelson, E.H., Rosenholtz, R. (2010). Exploring features in a bayesian framework for material recognition. In Computer vision and pattern recognition 2010. IEEE.
Lowe, D. G. (2004). Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. International Journal of Computer Vision, 60, 91–110.
Maji, S., Berg, A. C., & Malik, J. (2008). In CVPR: Classification using intersection kernel support vector machines is efficient.
Maji, S., & Malik, J. (2009). Object detection using a max-margin hough transform. In CVPR.
Ojala, T., Pietikainen, M., & Maenpaa, T. (2002). Multiresolution gray-scale and rotation invariant texture classification with local binary patterns. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 24(7), 971–987.
Perronnin, F., Sánchez, J., & Thomas M. (2010). In ECCV: Improving the Fisher Kernel for large-scale image classification.
Shi, J., & Malik, J. (2000). Normalized cuts and image segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 22, 888–905.
Sivic, J., Zisserman, A.(2003). Video google: A text retrieval approach to object matching in videos. In ICCV.
Sonnenburg, S., Raetsch, G., Henschel, S., Widmer, C., Behr, J., Zien, A., et al. (2010). The shogun machine learning toolbox. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 11, 1799–1802.
Tu, Z., Chen, X., Yuille, A. L., & Zhu, S. (2005). Image parsing: Unifying segmentation, detection and recognition. Marr Prize Issue. International Journal of Computer Vision.
Uijlings, J. R. R., Smeulders, A. W. M., & Scha, R. J. H. (2010). Real-time visual concept classification. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 12(7), 665–681.
van de Sande, K. E. A., & Gevers, T. (2012). Illumination-invariant descriptors for discriminative visual object categorization. Technical report : University of Amsterdam.
van de Sande, K. E. A., Gevers, T., & Snoek, C. G. M. (2010). Evaluating color descriptors for object and scene recognition. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 32, 1582–1596.
van de Sande, K. E. A., Gevers, T., & Snoek, C. G. M. (2011). Empowering visual categorization with the GPU. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 13(1), 60–70.
Vedaldi, A., Gulshan, V., Varma, M., & Zisserman, A. (2009). In ICCV: Multiple kernels for object detection.
Viola, P., & Jones, M. (2001). Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. In CVPR, Volume 1, 511–518.
Viola, P., & Jones, M. J. (2004). Robust real-time face detection. International Journal of Computer Vision, 57, 137–154.
Zhou, X., Kai, Y., Zhang, T., & Huang, T. S. (2010). In ECCV: Image classification using super-vector coding of local image descriptors.
Zhu, L., Chen, Y., Yuille, A., & Freeman, W. (2010). In CVPR: Latent hierarchical structural learning for object detection.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Uijlings, J.R.R., van de Sande, K.E.A., Gevers, T. et al. Selective Search for Object Recognition. Int J Comput Vis 104, 154–171 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-013-0620-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-013-0620-5