Interactive segmentation for color image based on color saliency

Efficient interactive foreground extraction from color images is of great practical importance in computer vision. In recent yaers, an approach, based on optimization using graph-cuts has been widely used. However, an interactive foreground extraction approach, which is intuitive and efficient for users, is required for practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive foreground extraction method based on color saliency. In our method, the user provides only some foreground pixels as the initial reference. To achieve extraction of multi target objects, likelihoods of the foreground and background are defined by a gaussian mixture model and a color saliency map based on the provided reference pixels. These likelihoods are added to the cost of the proposed graph. Finally, image segmentation is performed by optimizing the proposed graph using the graph-cut algorithm. © 2013 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.