Robust image segmentation against complex color distribution

摘要

Color distribution is the most effective cue that is widely adopted in previous interactive image segmentation methods. However, it also may introduce additional errors in some situations, for example, when the foreground and background have similar colors. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel method to learn the segmentation likelihoods. The proposed method is designed for high reliability, for which purpose it may choose to discard some unreliable likelihoods that may cause segmentation error. The reliability of likelihoods is estimated in a few Expectation-Maximization iterations. In each iteration, a novel multi-class transductive learning algorithm, namely, the Constrained Mapping, is proposed to learn likelihoods and identify unreliable likelihoods simultaneously. The resulting likelihoods then can be used as the input of any segmentation methods to improve their robustness. Experiments show that the proposed method is an effective way to improve both segmentation quality and efficiency, especially when the input image has complex color distribution.