Toward a generic evaluation of image segmentation

Image segmentation plays a major role in a broad range of applications. Evaluating the adequacy of a segmentation algorithm for a given application is a requisite both to allow the appropriate selection of segmentation algorithms as well as to tune their parameters for optimal performance. However, objective segmentation quality evaluation is far from being a solved problem. In this paper, a generic framework for segmentation evaluation is introduced after a brief review of previous work. A metric based on the distance between segmentation partitions is proposed to overcome some of the limitations of existing approaches. Symmetric and asymmetric distance metric alternatives are presented to meet the specificities of a wide class of applications. Experimental results confirm the potential of the proposed measures.