Image segmentation by iterated region merging with localized graph cuts

This paper presents an iterated region merging-based graph cuts algorithm which is a novel extension of the standard graph cuts algorithm. Graph cuts addresses segmentation in an optimization framework and finds a globally optimal solution to a wide class of energy functions. However, the extraction of objects in a complex background often requires a lot of user interaction. The proposed algorithm starts from the user labeled sub-graph and works iteratively to label the surrounding un-segmented regions. In each iteration, only the local neighboring regions to the labeled regions are involved in the optimization so that much interference from the far unknown regions can be significantly reduced. Meanwhile, the data models of the object and background are updated iteratively based on high confident labeled regions. The sub-graph requires less user guidance for segmentation and thus better results can be obtained under the same amount of user interaction. Experiments on benchmark datasets validated that our method yields much better segmentation results than the standard graph cuts and the Grabcut methods in either qualitative or quantitative evaluation. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.