Interactive Graph Cuts for Optimal Boundary & Region Segmentation of Objects in N-D Images

Yuri Boykov, Marie-Pierre Jolly

In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), vol. I, pp. 105-112, 2001

Abstract

In this paper we describe a new technique for general purpose interactive segmentation of N-dimensional images. The user marks certain pixels as ``object'' or ``background'' to provide hard constraints for segmentation. Additional soft constraints incorporate both boundary and region information. Graph cuts are used to find the globally optimal segmentation of the N-dimensional image. The obtained solution gives the best balance of boundary and region properties among all segmentations satisfying the constraints. The topology of our segmentation is unrestricted and both ``object'' and ``background'' segments may consist of several isolated parts. Some experimental results are presented in the context of photo/video editing and medical image segmentation. We also demonstrate an interesting Gestalt example. A fast implementation of our segmentation method is possible via a new max-flow algorithm in PAMI'04.


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