Unsupervised image co-segmentation via guidance of simple images

Abstract This paper proposes a novel image co-segmentation method, which aims to segment the common objects in a group of images. The proposed method takes advantages of the reliability of simple images and successfully improves the performance. The images are first ranked by the complexities based on their saliency maps. Then, the simple images, in which objects are common and easy to be segmented, are selected and processed to obtain their segmentation results, these segmentation results are taken as the samples of the targeted objects. Finally, the remaining complicated images are segmented with the guidance of the samples. The experiments on the iCoseg dataset demonstrate the outperformance and robustness of the proposed method.