Adaptive figure-ground classification

Abstract

We propose an adaptive figure-ground classification algorithm to automatically extract a foreground region using a user-provided bounding-box. The image is first over-segmented with an adaptive mean-shift algorithm, from which background and foreground priors are estimated. The remaining patches are iteratively assigned based on their distances to the priors, with the foreground prior being updated online. A large set of candidate segmentations are obtained by changing the initial foreground prior. The best candidate is determined by a score function that evaluates the segmentation quality. Rather than using a single distance function or score function, we generate multiple hypothesis segmentations from different combinations of distance measures and score functions. The final segmentation is then automatically obtained with a voting or weighted combination scheme from the multiple hypotheses. Experiments indicate that our method performs at or above the current state-of-the-art on several datasets, with particular success on challenging scenes that contain irregular or multiple-connected foregrounds. In addition, this improvement in accuracy is achieved with low computational cost.