Co-Sparse Textural Similarity for Interactive Segmentation

Abstract. We propose an algorithm for segmenting natural images based on texture and color information, which leverages the co-sparse analysis model for image segmentation. As a key ingredient of this method, we introduce a novel textural similarity measure, which builds upon the co-sparse representation of image patches. We propose a statistical MAP inference approach to merge textural similarity with information about color and location. Combined with recently developed convex multilabel optimization methods this leads to an ecient algorithm for interac-tive segmentation, which is easily parallelized on graphics hardware. The provided approach outperforms state-of-the-art interactive segmentation methods on the Graz Benchmark.