Robust Region Grouping via Internal Patch Statistics

In this work, we present an efficient multi-scale low-rank representation for image segmentation. Our method begins with partitioning the input images into a set of super pixels, followed by seeking the optimal super pixel-pair affinity matrix, both of which are performed at multiple scales of the input images. Since low-level super pixel features are usually corrupted by image noises, we propose to infer the low-rank refined affinity matrix. The inference is guided by two observations on natural images. First, looking into a single image, local small-size image patterns tend to recur frequently within the same semantic region, but may not appear in semantically different regions. We call this internal image statistics as replication prior, and quantitatively justify it on real image databases. Second, the affinity matrices at different scales should be consistently solved, which leads to the cross-scale consistency constraint. We formulate these two purposes with one unified formulation and develop an efficient optimization procedure. Our experiments demonstrate the presented method can substantially improve segmentation accuracy.