Minimum Spanning Distance for Image Segmentation

In this paper, we review the design of Minimum Barrier Distance and propose a new path-wise distance metric called Minimum Spanning Distance (MSD). Unlike most existing distance metrics, which only define distance between two pixels on gray-scale images, the proposed distance metric conceptually estimates the color space spanned by the colors on the path of interest. Therefore, the MSD takes into consideration the three channels on color images at the same time to compute distance. Compared with other distance metrics, MSD can not only achieve the highest numerical scores but also produce visually good segmentation maps in our experiment of interactive segmentation on the Gulshan dataset.