A Generative Model for Parts-based Object Segmentation

The Shape Boltzmann Machine (SBM) has recently been introduced as a state-of-the-art model of foreground/background object shape. We extend the SBM to account for the foreground object's parts. Our model, the Multinomial SBM (MSBM), can capture both local and global statistics of part shapes accurately. We combine the MSBM with an appearance model to form a fully generative model of images of objects. Parts-based image segmentations are obtained simply by performing probabilistic inference in the model. We apply the model to two challenging datasets which exhibit significant shape and appearance variability, and find that it obtains results that are comparable to the state-of-the-art.