  We study the problems of multi-person pose segmentation in natural images and
instance segmentation in biological images with crowded cells. We formulate
these distinct tasks as integer programs where variables correspond to
poses/cells. To optimize, we propose a generic relaxation scheme for solving
these combinatorial problems using a column generation formulation where the
program for generating a column is solved via exact optimization of very small
scale integer programs. This results in efficient exploration of the spaces of
poses and cells.
