Learning image-specific parameters for interactive segmentation

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel interactive image segmentation technique that automatically learns segmentation parameters tailored for each and every image. Unlike existing work, our method does not require any offline parameter tuning or training stage, and is capable of determining image-specific parameters according to some simple user interactions with the target image. We formulate the segmentation problem as an inference of a conditional random field (CRF) over a segmentation mask and the target image, and parametrize this CRF by different weights (e.g., color, texture and smoothing). The weight parameters are learned via an energy margin maximization, which is solved using a constraint approximation scheme and the cutting plane method. Experimental results show that our method, by learning image-specific parameters automatically, outperforms other state-of-the-art interactive image segmentation techniques. © 2012 IEEE.