Semi-automatic Segmentation of Scattered and Distributed Objects

This paper presents a novel object segmentation technique to extract objects that are potentially scattered or distributed over the whole image. The goal of the proposed approach is to achieve accurate segmentation with minimum and easy user assistance. The user provides input in the form of few mouse clicks on the target object which are used to characterize its statistical properties using Gaussian mixture model. This model determines the primary segmentation of the object which is refined by performing morphological operations to reduce the false positives. We observe that the boundary pixels of the target object are potentially misclassified. To obtain an accurate segmentation, we recast our objective as a graph partitioning problem which is solved using the graph cut technique. The proposed technique is tested on several images to segment various types of distributed objects e.g. fences, railings, flowers. We also show some remote sensing application examples, i.e. segmentation of roads, rivers, etc. from aerial images. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.