Figure-Ground Discrimination by Mean Field Annealing

This research has been sponsored in part by Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, in part by the ORASIS project, and in part by CEC through the ESPRIT-BRA 3274 (FIRST) project.International audienceWe formulate the figure-ground discrimination problem as a combinatorial optimization problem. We suggest a cost function that makes explicit a definition of shape based on interactions between image edges. These interactions have some mathematical analogy with interacting spin systems -- a model that is well suited for solving combinatorial optimization problems. We devise a mean field annealing method for finding the global minimum of such a spin system and the method successfully solves for the figure-ground problem