Interactive Boundary Prediction for Object Selection

Interactive image segmentation is critical for many image editing tasks. While recent advanced methods on interactive segmentation focus on the region-based paradigm, more traditional boundary-based methods such as Intelligent Scissor are still popular in practice as they allow users to have active control of the object boundaries. Existing methods for boundary-based segmentation solely rely on low-level image features, such as edges for boundary extraction, which limits their ability to adapt to high-level image content and user intention. In this paper, we introduce an interaction-aware method for boundary-based image segmentation. Instead of relying on pre-defined low-level image features, our method adaptively predicts object boundaries according to image content and user interactions. Therein, we develop a fully convolutional encoder-decoder network that takes both the image and user interactions (e.g. clicks on boundary points) as input and predicts semantically meaningful boundaries that match user intentions. Our method explicitly models the dependency of boundary extraction results on image content and user interactions. Experiments on two public interactive segmentation benchmarks show that our method significantly improves the boundary quality of segmentation results compared to state-of-the-art methods while requiring fewer user interactions.