Snakecut: An integrated approach based on active contour and grabcut for automatic foreground object segmentation

Interactive techniques for extracting the foreground object from an image have been the interest of research in computer vision for a long time. This paper addresses the problem of an efficient, semi-interactive extraction of a foreground object from an image. Snake (also known as Active contour) and GrabCut are two popular techniques, extensively used for this task. Active contour is a deformable contour, which segments the object using boundary discontinuities by minimizing the energy function associated with the contour. GrabCut provides a convenient way to encode color features as segmentation cues to obtain foreground segmentation from local pixel similarities using modified iterated graphcuts. This paper first presents a comparative study of these two segmentation techniques, and illustrates conditions under which either or both of them fail. We then propose a novel formulation for integrating these two complimentary techniques to obtain an automatic foreground object segmentation. We call our proposed integrated approach as “SnakeCut”, which is based on a probabilistic framework. To validate our approach, we show results both on simulated and natural images.