Graph Cut-based Automatic Color Image Segmentation using Mean Shift Analysis

A graph cuts method has recently attracted a lot of attentions for image segmentation, as it can globally minimize energy functions composed of data term that reflects how each pixel fits into prior information for each class and smoothness term that penalizes discontinuities between neighboring pixels. In previous approaches to graph cuts-based automatic image segmentation, GMM(Gaussian mixture models) is generally used, and means and covariance matrixes calculated by EM algorithm were used as prior information for each cluster. However, it is practicable only for clusters with a hyper-spherical or hyper-ellipsoidal shape, as the cluster was represented based on the covariance matrix centered on the mean. For arbitrary-shaped clusters, this paper proposes graph cuts-based image segmentation using mean shift analysis. As a prior information to estimate the data term, we use the set of mean trajectories toward each mode from initial means randomly selected in color space. Since the mean shift procedure requires many computational times, we transform features in continuous feature space into 3D discrete grid, and use 3D kernel based on the first moment in the grid, which are needed to move the means to modes. In the experiments, we investigate the problems of mean shift-based and normalized cuts-based image segmentation methods that are recently popular methods, and the proposed method showed better performance than previous two methods and graph cuts-based automatic image segmentation using GMM on Berkeley segmentation dataset.