Waterpixels: Superpixels based on the watershed transformation

Abstract

Many 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 “superpixels”. 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 segmentation 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.