Joint Recovery of Dense Correspondence and Cosegmentation in Two Images

We propose a new technique to jointly recover cosegmentation and dense per-pixel correspondence in two images. Our method parameterizes the correspondence field using piecewise similarity transformations and recovers a mapping between the estimated common "foreground" regions in the two images allowing them to be precisely aligned. Our formulation is based on a hierarchical Markov random field model with segmentation and transformation labels. The hierarchical structure uses nested image regions to constrain inference across multiple scales. Unlike prior hierarchical methods which assume that the structure is given, our proposed iterative technique dynamically recovers the structure as a variable along with the labeling. This joint inference is performed in an energy minimization framework using iterated graph cuts. We evaluate our method on a new dataset of 400 image pairs with manually obtained ground truth, where it outperforms state-of-the-art methods designed specifically for either cosegmentation or correspondence estimation.