A Particle Filter Framework for Contour Detection

We investigate the contour detection task in complex natural images. We propose a novel contour detection algorithm which locally tracks small pieces of edges called edgelets. The combination of the Bayesian modeling and the edgelets enables the use of semi-local prior information and image-dependent likelihoods. We use a mixed offline and online learning strategy to detect the most relevant edgelets. The detection problem is then modeled as a sequential Bayesian tracking task, estimated using a particle filtering technique. Experiments on the Berkeley Segmentation Datasets show that the proposed Particle Filter Contour Detector method performs well compared to competing state-of-the-art methods.