Beyond Pixels: A Comprehensive Survey from Bottom-up to Semantic Image Segmentation and Cosegmentation
This survey addresses the lack of up-to-date overviews in image segmentation for researchers and practitioners, providing a structured resource to understand advancements and future directions.
The authors conducted a comprehensive survey of image segmentation, covering 180 publications to review recent progress, including bottom-up approaches, superpixel methods, interactive techniques, object proposals, semantic parsing, and cosegmentation, while also discussing datasets and evaluation metrics.
Image segmentation refers to the process to divide an image into nonoverlapping meaningful regions according to human perception, which has become a classic topic since the early ages of computer vision. A lot of research has been conducted and has resulted in many applications. However, while many segmentation algorithms exist, yet there are only a few sparse and outdated summarizations available, an overview of the recent achievements and issues is lacking. We aim to provide a comprehensive review of the recent progress in this field. Covering 180 publications, we give an overview of broad areas of segmentation topics including not only the classic bottom-up approaches, but also the recent development in superpixel, interactive methods, object proposals, semantic image parsing and image cosegmentation. In addition, we also review the existing influential datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we suggest some design flavors and research directions for future research in image segmentation.