Human head-shoulder segmentation

In this paper, an automatic head-shoulder segmentation method for human photos based on graph cut with shape sketch constraint and border detection through learning is presented. We propose a new shape constraint method based upon graph cut for head-shoulder photos. First, a watershed algorithm is used to over segment the photo into superpixels; next, an iterative shape mask guided graph cut algorithm with sketch constraint is applied to the superpixel level graph to get a border that segments the head-shoulder from its background; finally, a border detector, which is trained by AdaBoost, is used to refine the border. Experiments on consumer photo images demonstrate its effectiveness.