Waterpixels: Superpixels based on the watershed transformation

International audienceMany sophisticated segmentation algorithms rely on a first low-level segmentation step where an image is partitioned into homogeneous regions with enforced compactness and adherence to object boundaries. These regions are called " su-perpixels ". While the marker controlled watershed transformation should in principle be well suited for this type of application , it has never been seriously tested in this setup, and comparisons to other methods were not made with the best possible settings. Here, we provide a scheme for applying the watershed transform for superpixel generation, where we use a spatially regularized gradient to achieve a tunable trade-off between superpixel regularity and adherence to object boundaries. We quantitatively evaluate our method on the Berkeley segmenta-tion database and show that we achieve comparable results to a previously published state-of-the art algorithm, while avoiding some of the arbitrary postprocessing steps the latter requires