Exploring part-aware segmentation for fine-grained visual categorization

It is challenge to segment fine-grained objects due to appearance variations and clutter of backgrounds. Most of existing segmentation methods hardly separate small parts of the instance from its background with sufficient accuracy. However, such small parts usually contain important semantic information, which is crucial in fine-grained categorization. Observing that fine-grained objects almost share the same configuration of parts, we present a novel part-aware segmentation method, which explicitly detects semantic parts and preserve these parts during segmentation. We firstly design a hybrid part localization method, which generates accurate part proposals with moderate computation. Then we iteratively update the segmentation outputs and the part proposals, which obtains better foreground segmentation results. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, as compared to state-of-the-art segmentation approaches for fine-grained categorization.