Winding Number for Region-Boundary Consistent Salient Contour Extraction

This paper aims to extract salient closed contours from an image. For this vision task, both region segmenta-tion cues (e.g. color/texture homogeneity) and boundary detection cues (e.g. local contrast, edge continuity and contour closure) play important and complementary roles. In this paper we show how to combine both cues in a unified framework. The main focus is given to how to maintain the consistency (compatibility) between the re-gion cues and the boundary cues. To this ends, we intro-duce the use of winding number–a well-known concept in topology–as a powerful mathematical device. By this de-vice, the region-boundary consistency is represented as a set of simple linear relationships. Our method is applied to the figure-ground segmentation problem. The experiments show clearly improved results. 1