Automatic Interpretation of Outdoor Scenes

This paper describes recent work on a neural network approach to outdoor scene interpretation. The results of evaluating a range of automatic region-based segmentation techniques based on a new segmentation quality metric are presented. The optimal technique is used to segment images of natural outdoor scenes. A powerful set of features designed for outdoor scene analysis is extracted from regions in the segmented images and used to train a neural network to recognise eleven different classes of objects, including sky, road, building and vegetation. The system is tested on a large number of images which have been hand-labelled to provide ground-truth segmentations and interpretations. This fully automated system achieves an impressive mean classification accuracy of 81.4% per image on unseen data, and runs in approximately 1 CPU minute on a Sun SPARCstation 20.