Interactive Segmentation with Incremental Watershed Cuts

Abstract

In this article, we propose an incremental method for computing seeded watershed cuts for interactive image segmentation. We propose an algorithm based on the hierarchical image representation called the binary partition tree to compute a seeded watershed cut. We show that this algorithm fits perfectly in an interactive segmentation process by handling user interactions, seed addition or removal, in time linear with respect to the number of affected pixels. Run time comparisons with several state-of-the-art interactive and non-interactive watershed methods show that the proposed method can handle user interactions much faster than previous methods achieving significant speedup from 15 to 90, thus improving the user experience on large images.