Saliency Driven Total Variation Segmentation

This paper introduces an unsupervised color segmentation method. The underlying idea is to segment the input image several times, each time focussing on a different salient part of the image and to subsequently merge all obtained results into one composite segmentation. We identify salient parts of the image by applying affinity propagation clustering to efficiently calculated local color and texture models. Each salient region then serves as an independent initialization for a figure/ground segmentation. Segmentation is done by minimizing a convex energy functional based on weighted total variation leading to a global optimal solution. Each salient region provides an accurate figure/ ground segmentation highlighting different parts of the image. These highly redundant results are combined into one composite segmentation by analyzing local segmentation certainty. Our formulation is quite general, and other salient region detection algorithms in combination with any sem...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Michael Donoser, Martin Urschler, Martin Hirzer and Horst Bischof
• Keywords: Computer Vision, ICCV 2009, Total Variation Segmentation