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Unsupervised segmentation evaluation: an edge-based method

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Abstract

Unsupervised segmentation evaluation method quantifies the quality of segmentation without the reference segmentation or user assistance. Although some methods have been proposed to statistically analyze the pixel values, these methods are not sensitive enough to provide a metric of segmentation quality. This paper uses the image edge, a more robust feature, to measure the quality of segmentation. An edge-based segmentation evaluation method is introduced in this paper, which can be applied to both image and single region segmentation evaluation. The proposed method evaluates the quality of segmentation with three edge-based measures: the edge fitness, the intra-region edge error, and the out-of-bound error. These measures encourage the outline of segmentation to align with the edge and punish the segmentation that exceeds the edge. Experiments results show that our method is more sensitive to under-segmentation and over-segmentation. Using the parameters optimized by the proposed method, the segmentation produced by the classic region growing method is visually similar to the state-of-the-art segmentation method.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (61170193, 61370102, 61370185), Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (S2012010009865, S2012020011081, S2013010013432, S2013010015940, 2014A030306050), Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province (2011B090400041, 2012B010100039, 2012B040305011, 2012B010100040), Education and Science Programs of Guangdong Province (11JXZ012,14JXN065), Guangdong Higher Education Discipline and Profession Special Fund Projects(2013KJCX0174), Science and Technology Planning Project of Huizhou City (2011P002, 2011g012, 2011P005, 2011P003, 2011g011, 2013B020015008, 2014B020004026) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, SCUT (2015PT022).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Huizhou University, Huizhou, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China

    Zhaoquan Cai

  2. South China University of Technology, Panyu District, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Yihui Liang & Han Huang

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  1. Zhaoquan Cai
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  2. Yihui Liang
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  3. Han Huang
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Correspondence to Yihui Liang.

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Cai, Z., Liang, Y. & Huang, H. Unsupervised segmentation evaluation: an edge-based method. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 11097–11110 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3542-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3542-8

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