Object segmentation by saliency-seeded and spatial-weighted region merging

In this paper, we present a region merging-based method for object segmentation in natural images. The method consists of three separate steps: (1) initial over-segmentation such that pixels in each region are as homogeneous as possible and therefore likely to be from the same object; (2) saliency-seeded interaction to provide proper prior input to guide the segmentation; (3) region merging by an introduced maximal spatially weighted similarity (MSWS) criterion. Saliency-seeded interaction can well reflect the human intention but does not require any manual user editing, which makes our method applicable to increasingly large-scale image databases. The MSWS criterion takes into account both the color similarity and spatial distance of the candidate regions for merging, which allows the region merging-based method to achieve better performance. Extensive experiments show that our method can reliably and automatically segment the objects from a great variety of natural images.