An unsupervised object-level image segmentation method based on foreground and background priors

Abstract

Conventional unsupervised image segmentation methods return many superpixels or object parts and thus tend to over-segmentation. In this paper, we present a novel post-processing approach for unsupervised object-level image segmentation (UnOLIS). Starting with the results of any conventional unsupervised segmentation method, we first combine a global region-based saliency and a robust background feature to cluster the pre-segmented regions into foreground and background. We then design a region growing process, encoded with several object priors, to generate a high quality foreground object segmentation. In parallel, we group the background regions into different stuffs by clustering. We test our method on the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset (BSDS500). Our approach significantly improves conventional unsupervised segmentation methods and achieves almost comparable results as the state-of-the-art supervised image segmentation methods.