Interactive Image Segmentation System for Visual Simulation

To use photographs in visual simulation such as synthesizing new images by overlapping an object in an image onto the other, physically significant regions corresponding to objects have to be segmented. Although a lot of researches have been done on fully automatic image segmentation technique, they are not always successful when the object to be segmented is complicated. As we have to segment various kinds of objects in performing visual simulation, it is not suitable to use fully automatic image segmentation techniques. We should instead develop a series of interactive segmentation tools that can speed the segmentation processes which are very laborious if all of them are performed manually pixel by pixel. Based on these ideas, we developed an interactive image segmentation system consists of three segmentation tools. One of the characteristic of this system is the segmentation tool that use edge information selectively in accordance with the pointing specifications by the human operators, which is described in detail.