Accelerated learning-based interactive image segmentation using pairwise constraints

Interactive Image Segmentation Using Adaptive Constraint Propagation

In this paper, we propose interactive image segmentation using adaptive constraint propagation (ACP), called ACP Cut. In interactive image segmentation, the interactive inputs provided by users play an important role in guiding image segmentation. However, these simple inputs often cause bias that leads to failure in preserving object boundaries. To effectively use this limited interactive information, we employ ACP for semisupervised kernel matrix learning which adaptively propagates the interactive information into the whole image, while successfully keeping the original data coherence. Moreover, ACP Cut adopts seed propagation to achieve discriminative structure learning and reduce the computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the ACP Cut extracts foreground objects successfully from the background and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for interactive image segmentation in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Multiatlas-Based Segmentation Editing With Interaction-Guided Patch Selection and Label Fusion

We propose a novel multiatlas-based segmentation method to address the segmentation editing scenario, where an incomplete segmentation is given along with a set of existing reference label images (used as atlases). Unlike previous multiatlas-based methods, which depend solely on appearance features, we incorporate interaction-guided constraints to find appropriate atlas label patches in the reference label set and derive their weights for label fusion. Specifically, user interactions provided on the erroneous parts are first divided into multiple local combinations. For each combination, the atlas label patches well-matched with both interactions and the previous segmentation are identified. Then, the segmentation is updated through the voxelwise label fusion of selected atlas label patches with their weights derived from the distances of each underlying voxel to the interactions. Since the atlas label patches well-matched with different local combinations are used in the fusion step, our method can consider various local shape variations during the segmentation update, even with only limited atlas label images and user interactions. Besides, since our method does not depend on either image appearance or sophisticated learning steps, it can be easily applied to general editing problems. To demonstrate the generality of our method, we apply it to editing segmentations of CT prostate, CT brainstem, and MR hippocampus, respectively. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing editing methods in all three datasets.