Interactive Cosegmentation Using Global and Local Energy Optimization

We propose a novel interactive cosegmentation method using global and local energy optimization. The global energy includes two terms: 1) the global scribbled energy and 2) the interimage energy. The first one utilizes the user scribbles to build the Gaussian mixture model and improve the cosegmentation performance. The second one is a global constraint, which attempts to match the histograms of common objects. To minimize the local energy, we apply the spline regression to learn the smoothness in a local neighborhood. This energy optimization can be converted into a constrained quadratic programming problem. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose an iterative optimization algorithm to decompose this optimization problem into several subproblems. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised cosegmentation and interactive cosegmentation methods on the iCoseg and MSRC benchmark data sets

Sub-Markov random walk for image segmentation

A novel sub-Markov random walk (subRW) algorithm with label prior is proposed for seeded image segmentation, which can be interpreted as a traditional random walker on a graph with added auxiliary nodes. Under this explanation, we unify the proposed subRW and other popular random walk (RW) algorithms. This unifying view will make it possible for transferring intrinsic findings between different RW algorithms, and offer new ideas for designing novel RW algorithms by adding or changing auxiliary nodes. To verify the second benefit, we design a new subRW algorithm with label prior to solve the segmentation problem of objects with thin and elongated parts. The experimental results on both synthetic and natural images with twigs demonstrate that the proposed subRW method outperforms previous RW algorithms for seeded image segmentation