  We consider detecting objects in an image by iteratively selecting from a set
of arbitrarily shaped candidate regions. Our generic approach, which we term
visual chunking, reasons about the locations of multiple object instances in an
image while expressively describing object boundaries. We design an
optimization criterion for measuring the performance of a list of such
detections as a natural extension to a common per-instance metric. We present
an efficient algorithm with provable performance for building a high-quality
list of detections from any candidate set of region-based proposals. We also
develop a simple class-specific algorithm to generate a candidate region
instance in near-linear time in the number of low-level superpixels that
outperforms other region generating methods. In order to make predictions on
novel images at testing time without access to ground truth, we develop
learning approaches to emulate these algorithms' behaviors. We demonstrate that
our new approach outperforms sophisticated baselines on benchmark datasets.
