Unsupervised Co-segmentation of complex image set via Bi-harmonic distance governed multi-level deformable graph clustering

Despite the recent success of extensive co-segmentation studies, they still suffer from limitations in accommodating multiple-foreground, large-scale, high-variability image set, as well as their underlying capability for parallel implementation. To improve, this paper proposes a bi-harmonic distance governed flexible method for the robust coherent segmentation of the overlapping/similar contents co-existing in image group, which is independent of supervised learning and any other user-specified prior. The central idea is the novel integration of bi-harmonic distance metric design and multi-level deformable graph generation for multi-level clustering, which gives rise to a host of unique advantages: accommodating multiple-foreground images, respecting both local structures and global semantics of images, being more robust and accurate, and being convenient for parallel acceleration. Critical pipeline of our method involves intrinsic content-coherent measuring, super-pixel assisted bottom-up clustering, and multi-level deformable graph clustering based cross-image optimization. We conduct extensive experiments on the iCoseg benchmark and Oxford flower datasets, and make comprehensive evaluations to demonstrate the superiority of our method via comparison with state-of-the-art methods collected in the MSRC database.