Multi-density peaks clustering superpixel

Abstract

A superpixel segmentation algorithm called multi-density peaks clustering (MDPC) is proposed. By selecting a sufficient number of local density maximum pixels from the image as cluster centers to depict the image texture, the boundary of the object can be captured very accurately. The algorithm framework of MDPC is divided into three steps. First, the local density of pixel is defined, and the local density maximum pixels are calculated. Then, the local density maximum pixels are used as cluster centers, and the global optimal search, which is based on the path-to-point idea, is used to complete the clustering of the remaining non-cluster center pixels to realize the initial segmentation. Finally, superpixels are obtained by merging the initial segments according to the size of the segments and the distance between adjacent segments. In quantitative comparisons, MDPC is compared with 13 state-of-the-art superpixel segmentation algorithms in three image segmentation datasets. The experimental results show that MDPC achieves better performance in terms of boundary recall, boundary precision, achievable segmentation accuracy, undersegmentation error, and explained variation. And the qualitative comparisons show that the proposed algorithm has obvious advantages over other superpixel segmentation algorithms in image detail description and boundary adherence. Finally, the practicability and stability of MDPC are further demonstrated by the application of image segmentation. The source code of MDPC will be available at https://github.com/zhaojianaaa.