Automatic image segmentation using constraint learning and propagation

• Automatic image segmentation method using constraint learning and propagation.
• Two-step approach of over-segmentation and classification.
• Pair-wise constraints (must-link and cannot-link) generated from initial seeds.
• Effective learning of the constraints by kernel propagation.

In this paper, we propose automatic image segmentation using constraint learning and propagation. Recently, kernel learning is receiving much attention because a learned kernel can fit the given data better than a predefined kernel. To effectively learn the constraints generated by initial seeds for image segmentation, we employ kernel propagation (KP) based on kernel learning. The key idea of KP is first to learn a small-sized seed-kernel matrix and then propagate it into a large-sized full-kernel matrix. By applying KP to automatic image segmentation, we design a novel segmentation method to achieve high performance. First, we generate pairwise constraints, i.e., must-link and cannot-link, from initially selected seeds to make the seed-kernel matrix. To select the optimal initial seeds, we utilize global k-means clustering (GKM) and self-tuning spectral clustering (SSC). Next, we propagate the seed-kernel matrix into the full-kernel matrix of the entire image, and thus image segmentation results are obtained. We test our method on the Berkeley segmentation database, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is very effective in automatic image segmentation.