Congratulations to Ye Wang for passing his defense on November 12, 2019. His Ph.D. thesis is entitled “Video Object Segmentation and Tracking with Deep Learning Techniques”.

Abstract of the thesis:

Video object segmentation (VOS) aims to segment foreground objects from complex background scenes in video sequences. It is a challenging problem because of the complex nature of videos: occlusions, motion blur, deforming shapes and truncations etc. There are two main categories in existing VOS methods: semi-supervised and unsupervised. Semi-supervised VOS algorithms require manually annotated object regions in the first frame and then automatically segment the specified object in the remaining frames throughout the video sequence. Unsupervised VOS algorithms segment the most conspicuous and eye-attracting objects without prior knowledge of these objects in the video.

This thesis describes how we build an intelligent system to perform video object segmentation and tracking. We discuss the challenges in this field and then propose deep learning algorithms to significantly improve the performances in this thesis. First, this thesis addresses unsupervised video object segmentation by designing pseudo ground truth and online adaptation. Second, a novel unsupervised video object segmentation approach via distractor-aware online adaptation is proposed to deal with challenging videos when multiple objects occur and interact in a given video clip. Finally, this thesis also presents a two-stage approach, track and then segment, to perform semi-supervised video object segmentation with only bounding box annotations. Besides, we provide some interesting problems which can be addressed in the future.

Ph.D. experience:

I am very fortunate to join Media Communications Lab (MCL) led by Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo in Fall 2015, who gave me the chance and inspiration to explore the new direction and guided me through my whole PhD study. His immense knowledge has greatly broadened my vision and his insistence in theoretical understanding in deep learning encourages me to never give up in my bad times. In addition, Professor Kuo provides prompt help and care not only in the academic area but also in daily life, I am indeed lucky to be a member of MCL.