A mutual GrabCut method to solve co-segmentation

Abstract

Publised version of an article from the journal:Eurasip Journal on Image and Video Processing. Also available on SpringerLink:http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1687-5281-2013-20. Open AccessCo-segmentation aims at segmenting common objects from a group of images. Markov random field (MRF) has been widely used to solve co-segmentation, which introduces a global constraint to make the foreground similar to each other. However, it is difficult to minimize the new model. In this paper, we propose a new Markov random field-based co-segmentation model to solve co-segmentation problem without minimization problem. In our model, foreground similarity constraint is added into the unary term of MRF model rather than the global term, which can be minimized by graph cut method. In the model, a new energy function is designed by considering both the foreground similarity and the background consistency. Then, a mutual optimization approach is used to minimize the energy function. We test the proposed method on many pairs of images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method