This paper presents an iterated region merging-based graph cuts algorithm
which is a novel extension of the standard graph cuts algorithm. Graph cuts
addresses segmentation in an optimization framework and finds a globally
optimal solution to a wide class of energy functions. However, the extraction
of objects in a complex background often requires a lot of user interaction.
The proposed algorithm starts from the user labeled sub-graph and works
iteratively to label the surrounding un-segmented regions. In each iteration,
only the local neighboring regions to the labeled regions are involved in the
optimization so that much interference from the far unknown regions can be
significantly reduced. Meanwhile, the data models of the object and background are updated iteratively based on high confident labeled regions. The
sub-graph requires less user guidance for segmentation and thus better results
can be obtained under the same amount of user interaction. Experiments on
benchmark datasets validated that our method yields much better segmentation results than the standard graph cuts and the Grabcut methods in either
qualitative or quantitative evaluation.
Keywords: Image segmentation, graph cuts, region merging