CVPR Daily - Wednesday

Holger just finished his PhD at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Vittorio Ferrari and is now a research scientist at nuTonomy. Holger spoke to us after his poster presentation yesterday about his work on stuff and things, which he says is taking the very popular COCO dataset and augmenting it with pixel-level stuff annotations. Firstly, what are stuff and things ? Things are objects with a clear shape and size. Stuff are all the other amorphous background regions that don’t have a clear shape and size, have no instances, and are often defined by texture. Holger explains: “ We need stuff to know more about the scene. It’s not just about cars, you have to know about the road as well. You want to know about the kind of scene, like a highway maybe. You want to know about the 3D set-up of the scene and you can infer that from stuff. It’s also about material types and all those aspects. Even if you don’t care about stuff, you can use stuff to find things in the scene. Maybe with our annotations, you can improve your results on COCO itself. ” At ICCV 2017 , Holger tells us that he organised and presented the COCO- Stuff Segmentation Challenge . It was a new segmentation challenge only on the stuff labels. The next step, he says, coming soon at ECCV 2018 in September, is the Panoptic Segmentation Challenge, which will cover both stuff and things. 6 Holger Caesar Wednesday “…we are moving in a 3D world!” “Things are objects with a clear shape and size. Stuff are all the other amorphous background regions that don’t have a clear shape and size.”