PRINCIPAL GEODESIC ANALYSIS BOUNDARY DELINEATION WITH SUPERPIXEL-BASED CONSTRAINTS

Abstract

In this paper an algorithm for accurate delineation of object boundaries is proposed. The method employs a superpixel algorithm to obtain an oversegmentation of the input image, used as a constraint in the task. A shape model is built by applying Principal Geodesic Analysis on angular representation of automatically placed uniformly distant landmark points. The shape model is used to detect the boundaries of an object on a given image by iterative elongation of a partial boundary along borders of superpixels. Contrary to many state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach does not need an initial boundary. The algorithm was tested on two natural and two synthetic sets of images. Mean Dice coefficients between 0.91 and 0.97 were obtained. In almost all cases the object was found. In areas of relatively high gradient magnitude the borders are delineated very accurately, though further research is needed to improve the accuracy in areas of low gradient magnitude and automatically select the parameters of the proposed error function.