BACA: Superpixel Segmentation with Boundary Awareness and Content Adaptation

Abstract

Superpixels could aggregate pixels with similar properties, thus reducing the number of image primitives for subsequent advanced computer vision tasks. Nevertheless, existing algorithms are not effective enough to tackle computing redundancy and inaccurate segmentation. To this end, an optimized superpixel generation framework termed Boundary Awareness and Content Adaptation (BACA) is presented. Firstly, an adaptive seed sampling method based on content complexity is proposed in the initialization stage. Different from the conventional uniform mesh initialization, it takes content differentiation into consideration to incipiently eliminate the redundancy of seed distribution. In addition to the efficient initialization strategy, this work also leverages contour prior information to strengthen the boundary adherence from whole to part. During the similarity calculation of inspecting the unlabeled pixels in the non-iterative clustering framework, a multi-feature associated measurement is put forward to ameliorate the misclassification of boundary pixels. Experimental results indicate that the two optimizations could generate a synergistic effect. The integrated BACA achieves an outstanding under-segmentation error (3.34%) on the BSD dataset over the state-of-the-art performances with a minimum number of superpixels (345). Furthermore, it is not limited to image segmentation and can be facilitated by remote sensing imaging analysis.