Unsupervised regions based segmentation using object discovery

•A fully unsupervised foreground object discovery scheme is proposed.•A tree-constrained iterative algorithm achieves high accuracy for segmentation.•Color-based FG model works well on objects with complicated fine structures.

We present a new unsupervised algorithm to discovery and segment out common objects from multiple images. Compared with previous cosegmentation methods, our algorithm performs well even when the appearance variations in the foregrounds are more substantial than those in some areas of the backgrounds. Our algorithm mainly includes two parts: the foreground object discovery scheme and the iterative region allocation algorithm. Two terms, a region-saliency prior and a region-repeatness measure, are introduced in the foreground object discovery scheme to detect the foregrounds without any supervisory information. The iterative region allocation algorithm searches the optimal solution for the final segmentation with the constraints from a maximal spanning tree, and an effective color-based model is utilized during this process. The comparative experimental results show that the proposed algorithm matches or outperforms several previous methods on several standard datasets.