Guided informative image partitioning

Image partitioning separates an image into multiple visually and semantically homogeneous regions, providing a summary of visual content. Knowing that human observers focus on interesting objects or regions when interpreting a scene, and envisioning the usefulness of this focus in many computer vision tasks, this paper develops a user-attention adaptive image partitioning approach. Given a set of pairs of oversegments labeled by a user as "should be merged" or "should not be merged", the proposed approach produces a fine partitioning in user defined interesting areas, to retain interesting information, and a coarser partitioning in other regions to provide a parsimonious representation. To achieve this, a novel Markov Random Field (MRF) model is used to optimally infer the relationship ("merge" or "not merge") among oversegment pairs, by using the graph nodes to describe the relationship between pairs. By training an SVM classifier to provide the data term, a graph-cut algorithm is employed to infer the best MRF configuration. We discuss the difficulty in translating this configuration back to an image labelling, and develop a non-trivial post-processing to refine the configuration further. Experimental verification on benchmark data sets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.