Efficient MRF Energy Propagation for Video Segmentation via Bilateral Filters

Segmentation of an object from a video is a challenging task in multimedia applications. Depending on the application, automatic or interactive methods are desired; however, regardless of the application type, efficient computation of video object segmentation is crucial for time-critical applications; specifically, mobile and interactive applications require near real-time efficiencies. In this paper, we address the problem of video segmentation from the perspective of efficiency. We initially redefine the problem of video object segmentation as the propagation of MRF energies along the temporal domain. For this purpose, a novel and efficient method is proposed to propagate MRF energies throughout the frames via bilateral filters without using any global texture, color or shape model. Recently presented bi-exponential filter is utilized for efficiency, whereas a novel technique is also developed to dynamically solve graph-cuts for varying, non-lattice graphs in general linear filtering scenario. These improvements are experimented for both automatic and interactive video segmentation scenarios. Moreover, in addition to the efficiency, segmentation quality is also tested both quantitatively and qualitatively. Indeed, for some challenging examples, significant time efficiency is observed without loss of segmentation quality.Comment: Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on (Volume:16, Issue: 5, Aug. 2014

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 “scribble-driven” 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

Interactive volumetric segmentation for textile micro-tomography data using wavelets and nonlocal means

This work addresses segmentation of volumetric images of woven carbon fiber textiles from micro-tomography data. We propose a semi-supervised algorithm to classify carbon fibers that requires sparse input as opposed to completely labeled images. The main contributions are: (a) design of effective discriminative classifiers, for three-dimensional textile samples, trained on wavelet features for segmentation; (b) coupling of previous step with nonlocal means as simple, efficient alternative to the Potts model; and (c) demonstration of reuse of classifier to diverse samples containing similar content. We evaluate our work by curating test sets of voxels in the absence of a complete ground truth mask. The algorithm obtains an average 0.95 F1 score on test sets and average F1 score of 0.93 on new samples. We conclude with discussion of failure cases and propose future directions toward analysis of spatiotemporal high-resolution micro-tomography images

Combinatorial Continuous Maximal Flows

Maximum flow (and minimum cut) algorithms have had a strong impact on computer vision. In particular, graph cuts algorithms provide a mechanism for the discrete optimization of an energy functional which has been used in a variety of applications such as image segmentation, stereo, image stitching and texture synthesis. Algorithms based on the classical formulation of max-flow defined on a graph are known to exhibit metrication artefacts in the solution. Therefore, a recent trend has been to instead employ a spatially continuous maximum flow (or the dual min-cut problem) in these same applications to produce solutions with no metrication errors. However, known fast continuous max-flow algorithms have no stopping criteria or have not been proved to converge. In this work, we revisit the continuous max-flow problem and show that the analogous discrete formulation is different from the classical max-flow problem. We then apply an appropriate combinatorial optimization technique to this combinatorial continuous max-flow CCMF problem to find a null-divergence solution that exhibits no metrication artefacts and may be solved exactly by a fast, efficient algorithm with provable convergence. Finally, by exhibiting the dual problem of our CCMF formulation, we clarify the fact, already proved by Nozawa in the continuous setting, that the max-flow and the total variation problems are not always equivalent.Comment: 26 page