Star Shape Prior for Graph-Cut Image Segmentation

In recent years, segmentation with graph cuts is increasingly used for a variety of applications, such as photo/video editing, medical image processing, etc. One of the most common applications of graph cut segmentation is extracting an object of interest from its background. If there is any knowledge about the object shape (i.e. a shape prior), incorporating this knowledge helps to achieve a more robust segmentation. In this paper, we show how to implement a star shape prior into graph cut segmentation. This is a generic shape prior, i.e. it is not specific to any particular object, but rather applies to a wide class of objects, in particular to convex objects. Our major assumption is that the center of the star shape is known, for example, it can be provided by the user. The star shape prior has an additional important benefit it allows an inclusion of a term in the objective function which encourages a longer object boundary. This helps to alleviate the bias of a graph cut towards shorter segmentation boundaries. In fact, we show that in many cases, with this new term we can achieve an accurate object segmentation with only a single pixel, the center of the object, provided by the user, which is rarely possible with standard graph cut interactive segmentation.