Model-based graph-cut method for automatic flower segmentation with spatial constraints

In this paper, we present an accelerated system for segmenting flower images based on graph-cut technique which formulates the segmentation problem as an energy function minimization. The contribution of this paper consists to propose an improvement of the classical used energy function, which is composed of a data-consistent term and a boundary term. For this, we integrate an additional data-consistent term based on the spatial prior and we add gradient information in the boundary term. Then, we propose an automated coarse-to-fine segmentation method composed mainly of two levels: coarse segmentation and fine segmentation. First, the coarse segmentation level is based on minimizing the proposed energy function. Then, the fine segmentation is done by optimizing the energy function through the standard graph-cut technique. Experiments were performed on a subset of Oxford flower database and the obtained results are compared to the reimplemented method of Nilsback et al. 1]. The evaluation shows that our method consumes less CPU time and it has a satisfactory accuracy compared with the mentioned method above 1]. Display Omitted An improvement of the classical energy function (graph-cut) is proposed.Integration of spatial priori and gradient information improves segmentation result.A new "coarse-to-fine" flower segmentation method is presented and implemented.

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