Multi-scale region composition of hierarchical image segmentation

Hierarchical image segmentation is a prominent trend in the literature as a way to improve the segmentation quality. Generally, meaningful objects in an image are described by segments from different scales. Thus, one may spend extra effort on searching for the best representation of objects in the hierarchical segmentation result. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to optimally select the segmentation scale, which leads to a composite segmentation as the output. To this end, the quality of regions from different scales of the hierarchical segmentation is evaluated. Then, a graphical model is constructed as a set of nodes. The weights among nodes are computed according to the segmentation quality of regions in multiple levels. In order to optimize the labeling of each node in the graph, the composition process is performed twice with two sampling intervals. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on different datasets for popular hierarchical image segmentation algorithms. The results show that the output of the proposed algorithm can improve the quality of hierarchical segmentation in a single scale at a low cost of computation.