Notes
Slide Show
Outline
1
Announcements
  • Project 4 questions
  • Evaluations
2
Image Segmentation
  • Today’s Readings
    • Forsyth chapter 14
    • http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/HIPR2/morops.htm
      • Dilation, erosion, opening, closing

3
From images to objects
  • What Defines an Object?
    • Subjective problem, but has been well-studied
    • Gestalt Laws seek to formalize this
      • proximity, similarity, continuation, closure, common fate
      • see notes by Steve Joordens, U. Toronto
4
Image Segmentation
  • We will consider different methods
  • Already covered:
    • Intelligent Scissors (contour-based)
    • Hough transform (model-based)
  • Today:
    • K-means clustering (color-based)
    • Normalized Cuts (region-based)
5
Image histograms
  • How many “orange” pixels are in this image?
    • This type of question answered by looking at the histogram
    • A histogram counts the number of occurrences of each color
      • Given an image


      • The histogram is defined to be



      • What is the dimension of the histogram of an NxN RGB image?
6
What do histograms look like?
  • Photoshop demo
7
Histogram-based segmentation
  • Goal
    • Break the image into K regions (segments)
    • Solve this by reducing the number of colors to K and mapping each pixel to the closest color
      • photoshop demo
8
Histogram-based segmentation
  • Goal
    • Break the image into K regions (segments)
    • Solve this by reducing the number of colors to K and mapping each pixel to the closest color
      • photoshop demo
9
Clustering
  • How to choose the representative colors?
    • This is a clustering problem!
10
Break it down into subproblems
  • Suppose I tell you the cluster centers ci
    • Q:  how to determine which points to associate with each ci?
11
K-means clustering
  • K-means clustering algorithm
    • Randomly initialize the cluster centers, c1, ..., cK
    • Given cluster centers, determine points in each cluster
      • For each point p, find the closest ci.  Put p into cluster i
    • Given points in each cluster, solve for ci
      • Set ci to be the mean of points in cluster i
    • If ci have changed, repeat Step 2


  • Java demo:  http://www.elet.polimi.it/upload/matteucc/Clustering/tutorial_html/AppletKM.html


  • Properties
    • Will always converge to some solution
    • Can be a “local minimum”
      • does not always find the global minimum of objective function:

12
Probabilistic clustering
  • Basic questions
    • what’s the probability that a point x is in cluster m?
    • what’s the shape of each cluster?
  • K-means doesn’t answer these questions


  • Probabilistic clustering (basic idea)
    • Treat each cluster as a Gaussian density function
13
Expectation Maximization (EM)
  • A probabilistic variant of K-means:
    • E step: “soft assignment” of points to clusters
      • estimate probability that a point is in a cluster
    • M step:  update cluster parameters
      • mean and variance info (covariance matrix)
    • maximizes the likelihood of the points given the clusters
    • Forsyth Chapter 16 (optional)
14
EM demo




  • http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/ibayrakt/java/em/


15
Applications of EM
  • Turns out this is useful for all sorts of problems
    • any clustering problem
    • model estimation with missing/hidden data
    • finding outliers
    • segmentation problems
      • segmentation based on color
      • segmentation based on motion
      • foreground/background separation
    • ...


16
Cleaning up the result
  • Problem:
    • Histogram-based segmentation can produce messy regions
      • segments do not have to be connected
      • may contain holes


  • How can these be fixed?
17
Dilation operator:
18
Dilation operator
  • Demo
    • http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~majid/mengine/morph.html


19
Erosion operator:
20
Erosion operator
  • Demo
    • http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~majid/mengine/morph.html


21
Nested dilations and erosions
  • What does this operation do?
22
Nested dilations and erosions
  • What does this operation do?
23
Nested dilations and erosions
  • What does this operation do?
24
Graph-based segmentation?
25
Images as graphs
  • Fully-connected graph
    • node for every pixel
    • link between every pair of pixels, p,q
    • cost cpq for each link
      • cpq measures similarity
        • similarity is inversely proportional to difference in color and position
        • this is different than the costs for intelligent scissors
26
Segmentation by Graph Cuts
  • Break Graph into Segments
    • Delete links that cross between segments
    • Easiest to break links that have low cost (similarity)
      • similar pixels should be in the same segments
      • dissimilar pixels should be in different segments

27
Cuts in a graph
  • Link Cut
    • set of links whose removal makes a graph disconnected
    • cost of a cut:
28
But min cut is not always the best cut...
29
Cuts in a graph
30
Interpretation as a Dynamical System
  • Treat the links as springs and shake the system
    • elasticity proportional to cost
    • vibration “modes” correspond to segments
      • can compute these by solving an eigenvector problem
      • Forsyth chapter 14.5
31
Interpretation as a Dynamical System
  • Treat the links as springs and shake the system
    • elasticity proportional to cost
    • vibration “modes” correspond to segments
      • can compute these by solving an eigenvector problem
      • Forsyth chapter 14.5
32
Color Image Segmentation