Object proposal on RGB-D images via elastic edge boxes

As a fundamental preprocessing of various multimedia applications, object proposal aims to detect the candidate windows possibly containing arbitrary objects in images with two typical strategies, window scoring and grouping. In this paper, we first analyze the feasibility of improving object proposal performance by integrating window scoring and grouping strategies. Then, we propose a novel object proposal method for RGB-D images, named elastic edge boxes. The initial bounding boxes of candidate object regions are efficiently generated by edge boxes, and further adjusted by grouping the super-pixels within elastic range to obtain more accurate candidate windows. To validate the proposed method, we construct the largest RGB-D image data set NJU1800 for object proposal with balanced object number distribution. The experimental results show that our method can effectively and efficiently generate the candidate windows of object regions and it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods considering both accuracy and efficiency.