A foreground segmentation method for mobile image retrieval system

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is an application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem. That is, the problem of searching for digital images in large database. In this paper, we apply an image segmentation technique to an image retrieval system which is designed for the use on mobile devices. Given an image captured by the mobile devices, edge detection and region merging mechanisms are used in this segmentation technique to extract the ROI from a complex background scene. The proposed method automatically merges the regions that are initially segmented by mean shift segmentation, and then effectively extracts the object contour by the labeled regions as either background or foreground. With no users interaction, the experimental results show the method is more effective than other automatic segmentation methods.