Interactive object segmentation from multi-view images

Despite the great progress on interactive image segmentation, image co-segmentation, 2D and 3D segmentation, there is still no workable solution to the problem: given a set of calibrated or un-calibrated multi-view images (say, more than 40 images), by interactively cutting 3 similar to 4 images, can the foreground object of the rest images be quickly cutout automatically and accurately? In this paper, we propose a non-trivial engineering solution to this problem. Our basic idea is to integrate 3D segmentation with 2D segmentation so as to combine their advantages. Our proposed system iteratively performs 2D and 3D segmentation, where the 3D segmentation results are used to initialize 2D segmentation and ensure the silhouette consistency among different views and the 2D segmentation results are used to provide more accurate cues for the 3D segmentation. The experimental results show that the proposed system is able to generate highly accurate segmentation results, even for some challenging real-world multi-view image sequences, with a small amount of user input. (c) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.