56,490 research outputs found
Image segmentation evaluation using an integrated framework
In this paper we present a general framework we have developed for running and evaluating automatic image and video segmentation algorithms. This framework was designed to allow effortless integration of existing and forthcoming image segmentation algorithms, and allows researchers to focus more on the development and evaluation of segmentation methods, relying on the framework for encoding/decoding and visualization. We then utilize this framework to automatically evaluate four distinct segmentation algorithms, and present and discuss the results and statistical findings of the experiment
A comparative evaluation of interactive segmentation algorithms
In this paper we present a comparative evaluation of four popular interactive segmentation algorithms. The evaluation was carried out as a series of user-experiments, in which participants were tasked with extracting 100 objects from a common dataset: 25 with each algorithm, constrained within a time limit of 2 min for each object. To facilitate the experiments, a âscribble-drivenâ segmentation tool was developed to enable interactive image segmentation by simply marking areas of foreground and background with the mouse. As the participants refined and improved their respective segmentations, the corresponding updated segmentation mask was stored along with the elapsed time. We then collected and evaluated each recorded mask against a manually segmented ground truth, thus allowing us to gauge segmentation accuracy over time. Two benchmarks were used for the evaluation: the well-known Jaccard index for measuring object accuracy, and a new fuzzy metric, proposed in this paper, designed for measuring boundary accuracy. Analysis of the experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of the suggested measures and provides valuable insights into the performance and characteristics of the evaluated algorithms
Automatic Image Segmentation by Dynamic Region Merging
This paper addresses the automatic image segmentation problem in a region
merging style. With an initially over-segmented image, in which the many
regions (or super-pixels) with homogeneous color are detected, image
segmentation is performed by iteratively merging the regions according to a
statistical test. There are two essential issues in a region merging algorithm:
order of merging and the stopping criterion. In the proposed algorithm, these
two issues are solved by a novel predicate, which is defined by the sequential
probability ratio test (SPRT) and the maximum likelihood criterion. Starting
from an over-segmented image, neighboring regions are progressively merged if
there is an evidence for merging according to this predicate. We show that the
merging order follows the principle of dynamic programming. This formulates
image segmentation as an inference problem, where the final segmentation is
established based on the observed image. We also prove that the produced
segmentation satisfies certain global properties. In addition, a faster
algorithm is developed to accelerate the region merging process, which
maintains a nearest neighbor graph in each iteration. Experiments on real
natural images are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed
dynamic region merging algorithm.Comment: 28 pages. This paper is under review in IEEE TI
Toward automated evaluation of interactive segmentation
We previously described a system for evaluating interactive segmentation by means of user experiments (McGuinness and OâConnor, 2010). This method, while effective, is time-consuming and labor-intensive. This paper aims to make evaluation more practicable by investigating if it is feasible to automate user interactions. To this end, we propose a general algorithm for driving the segmentation that uses the ground truth and current segmentation error to automatically simulate user interactions. We investigate four strategies for selecting which pixels will form the next interaction. The first of these is a simple, deterministic strategy; the remaining three strategies are probabilistic, and focus on more realistically approximating a real user. We evaluate four interactive segmentation algorithms using these strategies, and compare the results with our previous user experiment-based evaluation. The results show that automated evaluation is both feasible and useful
Noise-robust method for image segmentation
Segmentation of noisy images is one of the most challenging problems in image analysis and any improvement of segmentation methods can highly influence the performance of many image processing applications. In automated image segmentation, the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering has been widely used because of its ability to model uncertainty within the data, applicability to multi-modal data and fairly robust behaviour. However, the standard FCM algorithm does not consider any information about the spatial linage context and is highly sensitive to noise and other imaging artefacts. Considering above mentioned problems, we developed a new FCM-based approach for the noise-robust fuzzy clustering and we present it in this paper. In this new iterative algorithm we incorporated both spatial and feature space information into the similarity measure and the membership function. We considered that spatial information depends on the relative location and features of the neighbouring pixels. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on synthetic image with different noise levels and real images. Experimental quantitative and qualitative segmentation results show that our method efficiently preserves the homogeneity of the regions and is more robust to noise than other FCM-based methods
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Fuzzy image segmentation using location and intensity information
The segmentation results of any clustering algorithm are very sensitive to the features used in the similarity measure and the object types, which reduce the generalization capability of the algorithm. The previously developed algorithm called image segmentation using fuzzy clustering incorporating spatial information (FCSI) merged the independently segmented results generated by fuzzy clustering-based on pixel intensity and pixel location. The main disadvantages of this algorithm are that a perceptually selected threshold does not consider any semantic information and also produces unpredictable segmentation results for objects (regions) covering the entire image. This paper directly addresses these issues by introducing a new algorithm called fuzzy image segmentation using location and intensity (FSLI) by modifying the original FCSI algorithm. It considers the topological feature namely, connectivity and the similarity based on pixel intensity and surface variation. Qualitative and quantitative results confirm the considerable improvements achieved using the FSLI algorithm compared with FCSI and the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm for all three alternatives, namely clustering using only pixel intensity, pixel location and a combination of the two, for a range of sample of images
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