Abstract We propose SCALPEL, a flflexible method for object segmentation that integrates rich region-merging cues with mid- and high-level information about object layout, class, and scale into the segmentation process. Unlike competing approaches, SCALPEL uses a cascade of bottom-up segmentation models that is capable of learning to ignore boundaries early on, yet use them as a stopping criterion once the object has been mostly segmented. Furthermore, we show how such cascades can be learned effificiently. When paired with a novel method that generates better localized shape priors than our competitors, our method leads to a concise, accurate set of segmentation proposals; these proposals are more accurate on the PASCAL VOC2010 dataset than state-of-the-art methods that use re-ranking to fifilter much larger bags of proposals. The code for our algorithm is available online.