Superpixel Segmentation Using Gaussian Mixture Model

Superpixel segmentation partitions an image into perceptually coherent segments of similar size, namely, superpixels. It is becoming a fundamental preprocessing step for various computer vision tasks because superpixels significantly reduce the number of inputs and provide a meaningful representation for feature extraction. We present a pixel-related Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to segment images into superpixels. GMM is a weighted sum of Gaussian functions, each one corresponding to a superpixel, to describe the density of each pixel represented by a random variable. Different from previously proposed GMMs, our weights are constant, and Gaussian functions in the sums are subsets of all the Gaussian functions, resulting in segments of similar size and an algorithm of linear complexity with respect to the number of pixels. In addition to the linear complexity, our algorithm is inherently parallel and allows fast execution on multi-core systems. During the expectation-maximization iterations of estimating the unknown parameters in the Gaussian functions, we impose two lower bounds to truncate the eigenvalues of the covariance matrices, which enables the proposed algorithm to control the regularity of superpixels. Experiments on a well-known segmentation dataset show that our method can efficiently produce superpixels that adhere to object boundaries better than the current state-of-the-art methods.