We study the cosegmentation problem where the objective
is to segment the same object (i.e., region) from a pair
of images. The segmentation for each image can be cast
using a partitioning/segmentation function with an additional
constraint that seeks to make the histograms of the
segmented regions (based on intensity and texture features)
similar. Using Markov Random Field (MRF) energy terms
for the simultaneous segmentation of the images together
with histogram consistency requirements using the squared
L2 (rather than L1) distance, after linearization and adjustments,
yields an optimization model with some interesting
combinatorial properties. We discuss these properties
which are closely related to certain relaxation strategies recently
introduced in computer vision. Finally, we show experimental
results of the proposed approach.
Chuck R. Dyer, Lopamudra Mukherjee, Vikas Singh