Segmenting Planar Superpixel Adjacency Graphs w.r.t. Non-planar Superpixel Affinity Graphs

Segmenting Planar Superpixel Adjacency Graphs w.r.t. Non-planar Superpixel Affinity Graphs

Bjoern Andres, Julian Yarkony, B. S. Manjunath, Steffen Kirchhoff, Engin Turetken, Charles C. Fowlkes, and Hanspeter Pfister.

Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (EMMCVPR), 2013.

We address the problem of segmenting an image into a previously unknown number of segments from the perspective of graph partitioning. Specifically, we consider minimum multicuts of superpixel affinity graphs in which all affinities between non-adjacent superpixels are negative. We propose a relaxation by Lagrangian decomposition and a constrained set of re-parameterizations for which we can optimize exactly and efficiently. Our contribution is to show how the planarity of the adjacency graph can be exploited if the affinity graph is non-planar. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in user-assisted image segmentation and show that the solution of the relaxed problem is fast and the relaxation is tight in practice.