Boosting image segmentation

This paper presents a new approach to image segmentation, based on the conditional random fields (CRF) modeling and AdaBoost. In the proposed segmentation algorithm, the discriminating characteristics are first learned online using a training machine, and then the learnt characteristics are used to improve the region segmentation. The proposed algorithm is devised to include any kind of features even if they have different semantics, and to learn the difference of regions by selecting and combining only a few discriminating features among them. These novel properties are accomplished by a new Gibbs energy derived from CRF, AdaBoost, and probabilistic interpretation of its strong classifier. Experimental results on various images show the effectiveness of the proposed method.