Towards robust and efficient segmentation: An approach based on inter-region contour and intra-region content analysis

We address the problem of boundary estimation by formulating it as inter-region contour and intra-region information analysis in the framework of graph-based segmentation. Given an image without any prior information about object model and class, we seek to approximate one´s instant perception of visual similarity. The method can serve as a preprocessing step for many higher level operations that require regional support, such as scene understanding and object recognition. We show in this paper that the defined region comparison predicate makes a better boundary estimator than efficient graph-based image segmentation (EGS) - a well known and widely used segmentation method. We further illustrate, by making a small relaxation, further improvement of segmentation performance can be achieved. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method.