Soft Color Segmentation and Its Applications

—We propose an automatic approach to soft color segmentation, which produces soft color segments with an appropriate amount of overlapping and transparency essential to synthesizing natural images for a wide range of image-based applications. Although manystate-of-the-artand complextechniques areexcellentat partitioning aninputimage tofacilitatederiving a semanticdescriptionofthe scene, to achieve seamless image synthesis, we advocate a segmentation approach designed to maintain spatial and color coherence among soft segments while preserving discontinuities by assigning to each pixel a set of soft labels corresponding to their respective color distributions. We optimize a global objective function, which simultaneously exploits the reliability given by global color statistics and flexibility of local image compositing, leading to an image model where the global color statistics of an image is represented by a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), whereas the color of a pixel is explained by...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: PAMI
• Authors: Yu-Wing Tai, Jiaya Jia, Chi-Keung Tang
• Keywords: Color, Global Color Statistics, Image, PAMI 2007