Computing contour closure

Abstract

Existing methods for grouping edges on the basis of local smoothness measures fail to compute complete contours in natural images: it appears that a stronger global constraint is required. Motivated by growing evidence that the human visual system exploits contour closure for the purposes of perceptual grouping [6, 7,14,15, 25], we present an algorithm for computing highly closed bounding contours from images. Unlike previous algorithms [11, 18, 26], no restrictions are placed on the type of structure bounded or its shape. Contours are represented locally by tangent vectors, augmented by image intensity estimates. A Bayesian model is developed for the likelihood that two tangent vectors form contiguous components of the same contour. Based on this model, a sparsely-connected graph is constructed, and the problem of computing closed contours is posed as the computation of shortest-path cycles in this graph. We show that simple tangent cycles can be efficiently computed in natural images containing many local ambiguities, and that these cycles generally correspond to bounding contours in the image. These closure computations can potentially complement region-grouping methods by extending the class of structures segmented to include heterogeneous structures.