A Geodesic Active Contour Framework for Finding Glass

This paper addresses the problem of finding objects made of glass (or other transparent materials) in images. Since the appearance of glass objects depends for the most part on what lies behind them, we propose to use binary criteria ("are these two regions made of the same material?") rather than unary ones ("is this glass?") to guide the segmentation process. Concretely, we combine two complementary measures of affinity between regions made of the same material and discrepancy between regions made of different ones into a single objective function, and use the geodesic active contour framework to minimize this function over pixel labels. The proposed approach has been implemented, and qualitative and quantitative experimental results are presented.