Learning Affinity Functions for Image Segmentation: Combining Patch-based and Gradient-based Approaches

This paper studies the problem of combining region and boundary cues for natural image segmentation. We employ a large database of manually segmented images in order to learn an optimal affinity function between pairs of pixels. These pairwise affinities can then be used to cluster the pixels into visually coherent groups. Region cues are computed as the similarity in brightness, color, and texture between image patches. Boundary cues are incorporated by looking for the presence of an "intervening contour", a large gradient along a straight line connecting two pixels. We first use the dataset of human segmentations to individually optimize parameters of the patch and gradient features for brightness, color, and texture cues. We then quantitatively measure the power of different feature combinations by computing the precision and recall of classifiers trained using those features. The mutual information between the output of the classifiers and the same-segment indicator func...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Charless Fowlkes, David R. Martin, Jitendra Malik
• Keywords: Boundary Cues, Color Patch Similarity, Computer Vision, CVPR 2003, Region Cues, Similarity Cues, Texture Cues