Scribble-based object segmentation with modified gaussian mixture models

In this paper, we present an interactive segmentation method, designed to help the user to extract an object of interest from an image. The proposed approach adopts the scribble-based segmentation paradigm. The user interaction consists of specifying a set of lines, corresponding to both foreground and background scribbles. The segmentation process is based on color distributions, estimated with Gaussian mixture models (GMM). We show that such a technique presents some limitations when dealing with compressed images, even for relatively high quality compression factors: in this case, blocking artifacts may degrade the segmentation results. In order to overcome such a drawback, a modified GMM model, which re-shapes the Gaussian mixture based on the eigenvalues of the GMM components, is proposed. The experimental evaluation, carried out on a corpus of various images with different characteristics and textures, demonstrates the superiority of the modified GMM model which is able to appropriately take into account compression artifacts.