Color Image Segmentation Based on Secondary Watershed and GrowCut Algorithm

Abstract

GrowCut algorithm is not only an interactive algorithm on the basis of cell automata, but also a multi-label algorithm based on seeds point. Aiming at the GrowCut algorithm usually asks users to partition foreground and background manually and mark a lot more initial seeds. This paper presents an automatic object segmentation method which combining secondary watershed and GrowCut algorithm, here in the following paper refers it to as SWGC algorithm. It firstly using the twice used watershed algorithm to partition the input image, the segmented regions are labeled using Mahalanobis distance, and merged according to the image color and space information, thereafter applying the GrowCut algorithm to perform globally optimized segmentation. The main contribution focuses on performing automatic segmentation which consist of obtain the foreground and background region and generate the seed template of GrowCut algorithm automatically. Thus not only leave out the constraints of user interaction operation, but also avoid the subjectivity and uncertainty. The proposed method reduces the runtime significantly as well as improves the segmentation accuracy and robustness of GrowCut algorithm. Experimental results show SWGC algorithm has superior performance compared to the other related methods.