Incorporating texture information into region-based unsupervised image segmentation using textural superpixels

Recently, an unsupervised image segmentation framework, Segmentation by Aggregating Superpixels (SAS) is proposed and shown to be very promising. However, the texture cues, which have been shown to be very effective in many researches, are not used. In this paper, we propose an effective method for incorporating texture information into the SAS framework, using superpixels. To extract texture information, our algorithm first uses texture filtering and subsequently GMM clustering. Then, we develop an edge-aware low-pass filtering to generate multiple-scale textural superpixels (TXSPs) from the clustering results. Finally, by joining TXSPs with the superpixel set originally used in SAS, the incorporation of texture information is accomplished. Our method achieves superior performance on the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset (BSDS300) under several evaluation criteria when compared to other benchmark algorithms.