Adaptive hypergraph superpixels

Abstract

Superpixel segmentation, which amounts to partitioning an image into a number of superpixels each of which is a set of pixels sharing common visual meanings, requires specific needs for different computer vision tasks. Graph based methods, as a kind of popular superpixel segmentation method, regard an image as a weighted graph whose nodes correspond to pixels of the image, and partition all pixels into superpixels according to the similarity between pixels over various feature spaces. Despite their improvement of the performance of segmentation, these methods ignore high-order relationship between them incurred from either locally neighboring pixels or structured layout of the image. Moreover, they measure the similarity of pairwise pixels using Gaussian kernel where a robust radius parameter is difficult to find for pixels which exhibit multiple features (e.g., texture, color, brightness). In this paper, we propose an adaptive hypergraph superpixel segmentation (AHS) of intensity images for solving both issues. AHS constructs a hypergraph by building the hyperedges with an adaptive neighborhood scheme, which explores an intrinsic relationship of pixels. Afterwards, AHS encodes the relationship between pairwise pixels using characteristics of current two pixels as well as their neighboring pixels defined by hyperedges. Essentially, AHS models the relationship of pairwise pixels in a high-order group fashion while graph based methods evaluate it in a one-vs-one fashion. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that AHS achieves higher or comparable performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.