BSLIC: SLIC Superpixels Based on Boundary Term

A modified method for better superpixel generation based on simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) is presented and named BSLIC in this paper. By initializing cluster centers in hexagon distribution and performing k-means clustering in a limited region, the generated superpixels are shaped into regular and compact hexagons. The additional cluster centers are initialized as edge pixels to improve boundary adherence, which is further promoted by incorporating the boundary term into the distance calculation of the k-means clustering. Berkeley Segmentation Dataset BSDS500 is used to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the proposed BSLIC method. Experimental results show that BSLIC achieves an excellent compromise between boundary adherence and regularity of size and shape. In comparison with SLIC, the boundary adherence of BSLIC is increased by at most 12.43% for boundary recall and 3.51% for under segmentation error.