MILCut: A Sweeping Line Multiple Instance Learning
Paradigm for Interactive Image Segmentation

Overview of the framework

Figure 1: An overview of our framework for harvesting mid-level visual concepts from large-scale Internet images

Abstract

Interactive segmentation, in which a user provides a bounding box to an object of interest for image segmentation, has been applied to a variety of applications in image editing, crowdsourcing, computer vision, and medical imaging. The challenge of this semi-automatic image segmentation task lies in dealing with the uncertainty of the foreground object within a bounding box. Here, we formulate the interactive segmentation problem as a multiple instance learning (MIL) task by generating positive bags from pixels of sweeping lines within a bounding box. We name this approach MILCut. We provide a justification to our formulation and develop an algorithm with significant performance and efficiency gain over existing state-of-the-art systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate the evident advantage of our approach.

Downloads

A demo of our MILCut system is available upon request.