NICE: Superpixel Segmentation Using Non-Iterative Clustering with Efficiency

Superpixels intuitively over-segment an image into small compact regions with homogeneity. Owing to its outstanding performance on region description, superpixels have been widely used in various computer vision tasks as the substitution for pixels. Therefore, efficient algorithms for generating sup...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cheng Li, Baolong Guo, Geng Wang, Yan Zheng, Yang Liu, Wangpeng He
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-06-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/12/4415
Description
Summary:Superpixels intuitively over-segment an image into small compact regions with homogeneity. Owing to its outstanding performance on region description, superpixels have been widely used in various computer vision tasks as the substitution for pixels. Therefore, efficient algorithms for generating superpixels are still important for advanced visual tasks. In this work, two strategies are presented on conventional simple non-iterative clustering (SNIC) framework, aiming to improve the computational efficiency as well as segmentation performance. Firstly, inter-pixel correlation is introduced to eliminate the redundant inspection of neighboring elements. In addition, it strengthens the color identity in complicated texture regions, thus providing a desirable trade-off between runtime and accuracy. As a result, superpixel centroids are evolved more efficiently and accurately. For further accelerating the framework, a recursive batch processing strategy is proposed to eliminate unnecessary sorting operations. Therefore, a large number of neighboring elements can be assigned directly. Finally, the two strategies result in a novel synergetic non-iterative clustering with efficiency (NICE) method based on SNIC. Experimental results verify that it works 40% faster than conventional framework, while generating comparable superpixels for several quantitative metrics—sometimes even better.
ISSN:2076-3417