Multitask Coupling Network for Occlusion Relation Reasoning

Abstract

Analysis of the occlusion relationships between different objects in an image is fundamental to computer vision, including both the accurate detection of multiple objects’ contours in an image and each pixel’s orientation on the contours of objects with occlusion relationships. However, the severe imbalance between the edge pixels of an object in an image and the background pixels complicates occlusion relationship reasoning. Although progress has been made using convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods, the limited coupling relationship between the detection of object occlusion contours and the prediction of occlusion orientation has not yet been effectively used in a full network architecture. In addition, the prediction of occlusion orientations and the detection of occlusion edges are based on the accurate extraction of the local details of contours. Therefore, we propose an innovative multitask coupling network model (MTCN). To address the abovementioned issues, we also present different submodules. The results of extensive experiments show that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods by 2.1% and 2.5% in Boundary-AP and by 3.5% and 2.8% in Orientation AP on the PIOD and BSDS datasets, respectively, indicating that the proposed method is more advanced than comparable methods.