Robust Image Segmentation Using Contour-Guided Color Palettes

The contour-guided color palette (CCP) is proposed for robust image segmentation. It efficiently integrates contour and color cues of an image. To find representative colors of an image, color samples along long contours between regions, similar in spirit to machine learning methodology that focus on samples near decision boundaries, are collected followed by the mean-shift (MS) algorithm in the sampled color space to achieve an image-dependent color palette. This color palette provides a preliminary segmentation in the spatial domain, which is further fine-tuned by post-processing techniques such as leakage avoidance, fake boundary removal, and small region mergence. Segmentation performances of CCP and MS are compared and analyzed. While CCP offers an acceptable standalone segmentation result, it can be further integrated into the framework of layered spectral segmentation to produce a more robust segmentation. The superior performance of CCP-based segmentation algorithm is demonstrated by experiments on the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset.