Multi-label automatic GrabCut for image segmentation

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-label automatic GrabCut technique for the problem of image segmentation. GrabCut is considered as one of the binary-label segmentation techniques because it is based on the famous s/t graph cut minimization technique for image segmentation. This paper extends the automatic binary-label GrabCut to a multi-label technique that can segment a given image into its natural segments without user intervention. Since multi-label segmentation is an NP-hard problem, the proposed algorithm converts the segmentation problem into multiple iterative piecewise binary label GrabCut segmentations. This implies separating one segment from the image, under consideration, per iteration. In this way, the proposed algorithm maintains the powerful advantage of the GrabCut to get the optimal solution for the segmentation problem. Evaluation of the segmentation results was carried out using different accuracy metrics from the literature. The evaluations were conducted with human ground truth segmentations from Berkeley benchmark dataset of natural images. Although human segmentations are semantically more meaningful, experiments showed that the proposed multi-label GrabCut provided matching segmentation results to that of individual humans with acceptable accuracy.