The problem of efficient, interactive foreground/background segmentation in still images is of great practical importance in image editing. Classical image segmentation tools use either texture (colour) information, e.g. Magic Wand, or edge (contrast) information, e.g. Intelligent Scissors. Recently, an approach based on optimization by graph-cut has been developed which successfully combines both types of information. In this paper we extend the graph-cut approach in three respects. First, we have developed a more powerful, iterative version of the optimisation. Secondly, the power of the iterative algorithm is used to simplify substantially the user interaction needed for a given quality of result. Thirdly, a robust algorithm for “border matting ” has been developed to estimate simultaneously the alpha-matte around an object boundary and the colours of foreground pixels. We show that for moderately difficult examples the proposed method outperforms competitive tools.

This paper presents a volumetric formulation for the multi-view stereo problem which is amenable to a computationally tractable global optimisation using Graph-cuts. Our approach is to seek the optimal partitioning of 3D space into two regions labelled as ‘object’ and ‘empty’ under a cost functional consisting of the following two terms: (1) A term that forces the boundary between the two regions to pass through photo-consistent locations and (2) a ballooning term that inflates the ‘object ’ region. To take account of the effect of occlusion on the first term we use an occlusion robust photo-consistency metric based on Normalised Cross Correlation, which does not assume any geometric knowledge about the reconstructed object. The globally optimal 3D partitioning can be obtained as the minimum cut solution of a weighted graph.

Combinatorial graph cut algorithms have been successfully applied to a wide range of problems in vision and graphics. This paper focusses on possibly the simplest application of graph-cuts: segmentation of objects in image data. Despite its simplicity, this application epitomizes the best features of combinatorial graph cuts methods in vision: global optima, practical efficiency, numerical robustness, ability to fuse a wide range of visual cues and constraints, unrestricted topological properties of segments, and applicability to N-D problems. Graph cuts based approaches to object extraction have also been shown to have interesting connections with earlier segmentation methods such as snakes, geodesic active contours, and level-sets. The segmentation energies optimized by graph cuts combine boundary regularization with region-based properties in the same fashion as Mumford-Shah style functionals. We present motivation and detailed technical description of the basic combinatorial optimization framework for image segmentation via s/t graph cuts. After the general concept of using binary graph cut algorithms for object segmentation was first proposed and tested in Boykov and Jolly (2001), this idea was widely studied in computer vision and graphics communities. We provide links to a large number of known extensions based on iterative parameter re-estimation and learning, multi-scale or hierarchical approaches, narrow bands, and other techniques for demanding photo, video, and medical applications.

We apply Stochastic Meta-Descent (SMD), a stochastic gradient optimization method with gain vector adaptation, to the training of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). On several large data sets, the resulting optimizer converges to the same quality of solution over an order of magnitude faster than limited-memory BFGS, the leading method reported to date. We report results for both exact and inexact inference techniques. 1.

This paper proposes a novel framework for labelling problems which is able to combine multiple segmentations in a principled manner. Our method is based on higher order conditional random fields and uses potentials defined on sets of pixels (image segments) generated using unsupervised segmentation algorithms. These potentials enforce label consistency in image regions and can be seen as a generalization of the commonly used pairwise contrast sensitive smoothness potentials. The higher order potential functions used in our framework take the form of the Robust P n model and are more general than the P n Potts model recently proposed by Kohli et al. We prove that the optimal swap and expansion moves for energy functions composed of these potentials can be computed by solving a stmincut problem. This enables the use of powerful graph cut based move making algorithms for performing inference in the framework. We test our method on the problem of multi-class object segmentation by augmenting the conventional CRF used for object segmentation with higher order potentials defined on image regions. Experiments on challenging data sets show that integration of higher order potentials quantitatively and qualitatively improves results leading to much better definition of object boundaries. We

a input sequence b automatic layer separation and background substitution in three different frames Figure 1: An example of automatic foreground/background segmentation in monocular image sequences. Despite the challenging foreground motion the person is accurately extracted from the sequence and then composited free of aliasing upon a different background; a useful tool in video-conferencing applications. The sequences and ground truth data used throughout this paper are available from [1]. This paper presents an algorithm capable of real-time separation of foreground from background in monocular video sequences. Automatic segmentation of layers from colour/contrast or from motion alone is known to be error-prone. Here motion, colour and contrast cues are probabilistically fused together with spatial and temporal priors to infer layers accurately and efficiently. Central to our algorithm is the fact that pixel velocities are not needed, thus removing the need for optical flow estimation, with its tendency to error and computational expense. Instead, an efficient motion vs nonmotion classifier is trained to operate directly and jointly on intensity-change and contrast. Its output is then fused with colour information. The prior on segmentation is represented by a second order, temporal, Hidden Markov Model, together with a spatial MRF favouring coherence except where contrast is high. Finally, accurate layer segmentation and explicit occlusion detection are efficiently achieved by binary graph cut. The segmentation accuracy of the proposed algorithm is quantitatively evaluated with respect to existing groundtruth data and found to be comparable to the accuracy of a state of the art stereo segmentation algorithm. Foreground/background segmentation is demonstrated in the application of live background substitution and shown to generate convincingly good quality composite video. 1 1.

Video matting is the process of pulling a high-quality alpha matte and foreground from a video sequence. Current techniques require either a known background (e.g., a blue screen) or extensive user interaction (e.g., to specify known foreground and background elements) . The matting problem is generally under-constrained, since not enough information has been collected at capture time. We propose a novel, fully autonomous method for pulling a matte using multiple synchronized video streams that share a point of view but differ in their plane of focus. The solution is obtained by directly minimizing the error in filter-based image formation equations, which are over-constrained by our rich data stream. Our system solves the fully dynamic video matting problem without user assistance: both the foreground and background may be high frequency and have dynamic content, the foreground may resemble the background, and the scene is lit by natural (as opposed to polarized or collimated) illumination.

This paper details a new approach for learning a discriminative model of object classes, incorporating texture, layout, and context information efficiently. The learned model is used for automatic visual understanding and semantic segmentation of photographs. Our discriminative model exploits texture-layout filters, novel features based on textons, which jointly model patterns of texture and their spatial layout. Unary classification and feature selection is achieved using shared boosting to give an efficient classifier which can be applied to a large number of classes. Accurate image segmentation is achieved by incorporating the unary classifier in a conditional random field, which (i) captures the spatial interactions between class labels of neighboring pixels, and (ii) improves the segmentation of specific object instances. Efficient training of the model on large datasets is achieved by exploiting both random feature selection and piecewise training methods. High classification and segmentation accuracy is

In this paper we present a fast new fully dynamic algorithm for the st-mincut/max-flow problem. We show how this algorithm can be used to efficiently compute MAP estimates for dynamically changing MRF models of labelling problems in computer vision, such as image segmentation. Specifically, given the solution of the max-flow problem on a graph, we show how to efficiently compute the maximum flow in a modified version of the graph. Our experiments showed that the time taken by our algorithm is roughly proportional to the number of edges whose weights were different in the two graphs. We test the performance of our algorithm on one particular problem: the object-background segmentation problem for video and compare it with the best known st-mincut algorithm. The results show that the dynamic graph cut algorithm is much faster than its static counterpart and enables real time image segmentation. It should be noted that our method is generic and can be used to yield similar improvements in many other cases that involve dynamic change in the graph.

In this paper we extend the class of energy functions for which the optimal α-expansion and αβ-swap moves can be computed in polynomial time. Specifically, we introduce a class of higher order clique potentials and show that the expansion and swap moves for any energy function composed of these potentials can be found by minimizing a submodular function. We also show that for a subset of these potentials, the optimal move can be found by solving an st-mincut problem. We refer to this subset as the P n Potts model. Our results enable the use of powerful move making algorithms i.e. α-expansion and αβ-swap for minimization of energy functions involving higher order cliques. Such functions have the capability of modelling the rich statistics of natural scenes and can be used for many applications in computer vision. We demonstrate their use on one such application i.e. the texture based video segmentation problem.