Hierarchical Segmentation Using Tree-Based Shape Spaces

Yongchao Xu, Edwin Carlinet, Thierry Geraud, Laurent Najman
2017 IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence  
Current trends in image segmentation are to compute a hierarchy of image segmentations from fine to coarse. A classical approach to obtain a single meaningful image partition from a given hierarchy is to cut it in an optimal way, following the seminal approach of the scale-set theory. While interesting in many cases, the resulting segmentation, being a non-horizontal cut, is limited by the structure of the hierarchy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that acts by transforming an input
more » ... ierarchy into a new saliency map. It relies on the notion of shape space: a graph representation of a set of regions extracted from the image. Each region is characterized with an attribute describing it. We weigh the boundaries of a subset of meaningful regions (local minima) in the shape space by extinction values based on the attribute. This extinction-based saliency map represents a new hierarchy of segmentations highlighting regions having some specific characteristics. Each threshold of this map represents a segmentation which is generally different from any cut of the original hierarchy. This new approach thus enlarges the set of possible partition results that can be extracted from a given hierarchy. Qualitative and quantitative illustrations demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.
doi:10.1109/tpami.2016.2554550 pmid:27101599 fatcat:jd6p3i743zdapdezd7u6t7benm