Video portrait segmentation (VPS), aiming at segmenting prominent foreground portraits from video frames, has received much attention in recent years. However, simplicity of existing VPS datasets leads to a limitation on extensive research of the task. In this work, we propose a new intricate large-scale Multi-scene Video Portrait Segmentation dataset MVPS consisting of 101 video clips in 7 scenario categories, in which 10,843 sampled frames are finely annotated at pixel level. The dataset has diverse scenes and complicated background environments, which is the most complex dataset in VPS to our best knowledge. Through the observation of a large number of videos with portraits during dataset construction, we find that due to the joint structure of human body, motion of portraits is part-associated, which leads that different parts are relatively independent in motion. That is, motion of different parts of the portraits is imbalanced. Towards this imbalance, an intuitive and reasonable idea is that different motion states in portraits can be better exploited by decoupling the portraits into parts. To achieve this, we propose a Part-Decoupling Network (PDNet) for video portrait segmentation. Specifically, an Inter-frame Part-Discriminated Attention (IPDA) module is proposed which unsupervisedly segments portrait into parts and utilizes different attentiveness on discriminative features specified to each different part. In this way, appropriate attention can be imposed to portrait parts with imbalanced motion to extract part-discriminated correlations, so that the portraits can be segmented more accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves leading performance with the comparison to state-of-the-art methods.
Recently, video conferencing apps have become functional by accomplishing such computer vision-based features as real-time background removal and face beautification. Limited variability in existing portrait segmentation and face parsing datasets, including head poses, ethnicity, scenes, and occlusions specific to video conferencing, motivated us to create a new dataset, EasyPortrait, for these tasks simultaneously. It contains 40,000 primarily indoor photos repeating video meeting scenarios with 13,705 unique users and fine-grained segmentation masks separated into 9 classes. Inappropriate annotation masks from other datasets caused a revision of annotator guidelines, resulting in EasyPortrait's ability to process cases, such as teeth whitening and skin smoothing. The pipeline for data mining and high-quality mask annotation via crowdsourcing is also proposed in this paper. In the ablation study experiments, we proved the importance of data quantity and diversity in head poses in our dataset for the effective learning of the model. The cross-dataset evaluation experiments confirmed the best domain generalization ability among portrait segmentation datasets. Moreover, we demonstrate the simplicity of training segmentation models on EasyPortrait without extra training tricks. The proposed dataset and trained models are publicly available.
A portrait is a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, especially one depicting only the face or head and shoulders. In the digital world the portrait of a person is captured by having the person as a subject in the image and capturing the image of the person such that the background is blurred. DSLRs generally do it by reducing the aperture to focus on very close regions of interest and automatically blur the background. In this paper I have come up with a novel approach to replicate the portrait mode from DSLR using any smartphone to generate high quality portrait images.
As the COVID-19 pandemic rampages across the world, the demands of video conferencing surge. To this end, real-time portrait segmentation becomes a popular feature to replace backgrounds of conferencing participants. While feature-rich datasets, models and algorithms have been offered for segmentation that extract body postures from life scenes, portrait segmentation has yet not been well covered in a video conferencing context. To facilitate the progress in this field, we introduce an open-source solution named PP-HumanSeg. This work is the first to construct a large-scale video portrait dataset that contains 291 videos from 23 conference scenes with 14K fine-labeled frames and extensions to multi-camera teleconferencing. Furthermore, we propose a novel Semantic Connectivity-aware Learning (SCL) for semantic segmentation, which introduces a semantic connectivity-aware loss to improve the quality of segmentation results from the perspective of connectivity. And we propose an ultra-lightweight model with SCL for practical portrait segmentation, which achieves the best trade-off between IoU and the speed of inference. Extensive evaluations on our dataset demonstrate the superiority of SCL and our model. The source code is available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg.
Designing a lightweight and robust portrait segmentation algorithm is an important task for a wide range of face applications. However, the problem has been considered as a subset of the object segmentation problem and less handled in the semantic segmentation field. Obviously, portrait segmentation has its unique requirements. First, because the portrait segmentation is performed in the middle of a whole process of many real-world applications, it requires extremely lightweight models. Second, there has not been any public datasets in this domain that contain a sufficient number of images with unbiased statistics. To solve the first problem, we introduce the new extremely lightweight portrait segmentation model SINet, containing an information blocking decoder and spatial squeeze modules. The information blocking decoder uses confidence estimates to recover local spatial information without spoiling global consistency. The spatial squeeze module uses multiple receptive fields to cope with various sizes of consistency in the image. To tackle the second problem, we propose a simple method to create additional portrait segmentation data which can improve accuracy on the EG1800 dataset. In our qualitative and quantitative analysis on the EG1800 dataset, we show that our method outperforms various existing lightweight segmentation models. Our method reduces the number of parameters from 2.1M to 86.9K (around 95.9% reduction), while maintaining the accuracy under an 1% margin from the state-of-the-art portrait segmentation method. We also show our model is successfully executed on a real mobile device with 100.6 FPS. In addition, we demonstrate that our method can be used for general semantic segmentation on the Cityscapes dataset. The code and dataset are available in https://github.com/HYOJINPARK/ExtPortraitSeg .
In this paper, we describe a fast and light-weight portrait segmentation method based on a new highly light-weight backbone (HLB) architecture. The core element of HLB is a bottleneck-based factorized block (BFB) that has much fewer parameters than existing alternatives while keeping good learning capacity. Consequently, the HLB-based portrait segmentation method can run faster than the existing methods yet retaining the competitive accuracy performance with state-of-the-arts. Experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.
Designing a lightweight and robust portrait segmentation algorithm is an important task for a wide range of face applications. However, the problem has been considered as a subset of the object segmentation problem. bviously, portrait segmentation has its unique requirements. First, because the portrait segmentation is performed in the middle of a whole process of many realworld applications, it requires extremely lightweight models. Second, there has not been any public datasets in this domain that contain a sufficient number of images with unbiased statistics. To solve the problems, we introduce a new extremely lightweight portrait segmentation model consisting of a two-branched architecture based on the concentrated-comprehensive convolutions block. Our method reduces the number of parameters from 2.1M to 37.7K (around 98.2% reduction), while maintaining the accuracy within a 1% margin from the state-of-the-art portrait segmentation method. In our qualitative and quantitative analysis on the EG1800 dataset, we show that our method outperforms various existing lightweight segmentation models. Second, we propose a simple method to create additional portrait segmentation data which can improve accuracy on the EG1800 dataset. Also, we analyze the bias in public datasets by additionally annotating race, gender, and age on our own. The augmented dataset, the additional annotations and code are available in https://github.com/HYOJINPARK/ExtPortraitSeg .
Albeit intensively studied, false prediction and unclear boundaries are still major issues of salient object detection. In this paper, we propose a Region Refinement Network (RRN), which recurrently filters redundant information and explicitly models boundary information for saliency detection. Different from existing refinement methods, we propose a Region Refinement Module (RRM) that optimizes salient region prediction by incorporating supervised attention masks in the intermediate refinement stages. The module only brings a minor increase in model size and yet significantly reduces false predictions from the background. To further refine boundary areas, we propose a Boundary Refinement Loss (BRL) that adds extra supervision for better distinguishing foreground from background. BRL is parameter free and easy to train. We further observe that BRL helps retain the integrity in prediction by refining the boundary. Extensive experiments on saliency detection datasets show that our refinement module and loss bring significant improvement to the baseline and can be easily applied to different frameworks. We also demonstrate that our proposed model generalizes well to portrait segmentation and shadow detection tasks.
Compared with other semantic segmentation tasks, portrait segmentation requires both higher precision and faster inference speed. However, this problem has not been well studied in previous works. In this paper, we propose a lightweight network architecture, called Boundary-Aware Network (BANet) which selectively extracts detail information in boundary area to make high-quality segmentation output with real-time( >25FPS) speed. In addition, we design a new loss function called refine loss which supervises the network with image level gradient information. Our model is able to produce finer segmentation results which has richer details than annotations.
Compared to the general semantic segmentation problem, portrait segmentation has higher precision requirement on boundary area. However, this problem has not been well studied in previous works. In this paper, we propose a boundary-sensitive deep neural network (BSN) for portrait segmentation. BSN introduces three novel techniques. First, an individual boundary-sensitive kernel is proposed by dilating the contour line and assigning the boundary pixels with multi-class labels. Second, a global boundary-sensitive kernel is employed as a position sensitive prior to further constrain the overall shape of the segmentation map. Third, we train a boundary-sensitive attribute classifier jointly with the segmentation network to reinforce the network with semantic boundary shape information. We have evaluated BSN on the current largest public portrait segmentation dataset, i.e, the PFCN dataset, as well as the portrait images collected from other three popular image segmentation datasets: COCO, COCO-Stuff, and PASCAL VOC. Our method achieves the superior quantitative and qualitative performance over state-of-the-arts on all the datasets, especially on the boundary area.