Random walks in directed hypergraphs and application to semi-supervised image segmentation

•We develop the directed hypergraph theory and introduce it in computer vision.•We develop the random walk concept in directed hypergraphs.•We propose a directed hypergraph model for image data representation.•We use random walks to perform image segmentation with directed hypergraphs.•Results show an improvement compared to traditional undirected hypergraphs.

In this paper, we introduce for the first time the notion of directed hypergraphs in image processing and particularly image segmentation. We give a formulation of a random walk in a directed hypergraph that serves as a basis to a semi-supervised image segmentation procedure that is configured as a machine learning problem, where a few sample pixels are used to estimate the labels of the unlabeled ones. A directed hypergraph model is proposed to represent the image content, and the directed random walk formulation allows to compute a transition matrix that can be exploited in a simple iterative semi-supervised segmentation process. Experiments over the Microsoft GrabCut dataset have achieved results that demonstrated the relevance of introducing directionality in hypergraphs for computer vision problems.