AN IMPROVED INTERACTIVE COLOR IMAGE SEGMENTATION USING REGION-BASED GRAPH CUTS

摘要

The problem of efficient interactive extraction of a foreground object in a complex environment is the primary one in image processing and computer vision. The segmentation method based on graph cuts has been studied over the recent years. There are two main drawbacks of these studies: decrease in performance when the foreground and the background have similar colors, and long computing time when the image is large. In this paper, we present a new foreground objects extraction method using a region-based graph cuts algorithm. The image is pre-segmented into a large number of small partitions using the mean shift (MS) method. We use the partitions to represent the nodes in the graph instead of pixels. This approach can reduce the optimization time, which is closely related to the number of nodes and edges in the graph. Compared with the pixel-based method, our method can yield an excellent performance and exhibit a faster speed.