Medial Fragments for Segmentation of Articulating Objects in Images

The Blum medial axis is known to provide a useful representation of pre-segmented shapes. Very little work to date, however, has examined its usefulness for extracting objects from natural images. We propose a method for combining fragments of the medial axis, generated from the Voronoi diagram of an edge map of a natural image, into a coherent whole. Using techniques from persistent homology and graph theory, we combine image cues with geometric cues from the medial fragments to aggregate parts of the same object into a larger whole. We demonstrate our method on images containing articulating objects, with an eye to future work applying articulation-invariant measures on the medial axis for shape matching between images.

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