Toward a generic evaluation of image segmentation

Abstract—Image segmentation plays a major role in a broad range of applications. Evaluating the adequacy of a segmentation algorithm for a given application is a requisite both to allow the appropriate selection of segmentation algorithms as well as to tune their parameters for optimal performance. However, objec-tive segmentation quality evaluation is far from being a solved problem. In this paper, a generic framework for segmentation evaluation is introduced after a brief review of previous work. A metric based on the distance between segmentation partitions is proposed to overcome some of the limitations of existing ap-proaches. Symmetric and asymmetric distance metric alternatives are presented to meet the specificities of a wide class of applica-tions. Experimental results confirm the potential of the proposed measures. Index Terms—Image segmentation, objective segmentation as-sessment, segmentation quality evaluation. I