Adaptive regularization parameter for graph cut segmentation

Abstract

Graph cut minimization formulates the segmentation problem as the liner combination of data and smoothness terms. The smoothness term is included in the energy formulation through a regularization parameter. We propose that the trade-off between the data and the smoothness terms should not be balanced by the same regularization parameter for the whole image. In order to validate the proposed idea, we build a system which adaptively changes the effect of the regularization parameter for the graph cut segmentation. The method calculates the probability of being part of the boundary for each pixel using the Canny edge detector at different hysteresis threshold levels. Then, it adjusts the regularization parameter of the pixel depending on the probability value. The experiments showed that adjusting the effect of the regularization parameter on different image regions produces better segmentation results than using a single best regularization parameter. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.