Automatic Segmentation of Interest Regions in Low Depth of Field Images Using Ensemble Clustering and Graph Cut Optimization Approaches
Gholamreza Rafiee, S.S. Dlay, Wai Lok Woo · 2012
Automatic segmentation of images with low depth of field (DOF) plays an important role in content-based multimedia applications. The proposed approach aims to separate the important objects (i.e., interest regions) of a given image from its defocused background in two stages. In stage one, image blocks are classified into object and background blocks using a novel cluster ensemble algorithm. By indicating the certain pixels (seeds) of the object and background blocks, a hard constraint is provided for the next stage of the approach. In stage two, a minimal graph cut is constructed using object and background seeds, which is based on the max-flow method. Experimental results for a wide range of busy-texture (i.e., noisy) and smooth regions demonstrate that the proposed approach provides better segmentation performance at higher speed compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.