# DAVIDSTUTZ

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05thAUGUST2014

J. Shi, J. Malik. Normalized Cuts and Image Segmentation. Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2008.

This paper proposes a graph based image segmentation technique which can be applied to a given superpixel segmentation, as well. An image is interpreted as weighted undirected graph $G = (V,E)$. If a superpixel segmentation is given, each superpixel forms a node, otherwise each pixel represents a node. The goal is to bipartition the graph into two disjoint sets $A \subset V$ and $B \subset V$ by minimizing the normalized cut $NCut(A, B)$ given by

$NCut(A, B) = \frac{cut(A, B)}{assoc(A, V)} + \frac{cut(A, B)}{assoc(A, V)}$.

Here, $cut(A, B) = \sum_{u \in A, v \in B} w_{u,v}$ and $assoc(A ,V) = \sum_{u \in A, v \in V} w_{u,v}$ where $w_{u,v}$ denotes the weight between node $u$ and node $v$ (we assume a fully connected graph where $w_{u,v}$ may be zero).

As shown in the paper, this criterion can be minimized by discretizing the second smallest eigenvalue corresponding to the generalized eigenvalue problem

$(D - W)y = \lambda D y$.

Assuming the nodes to be consecutively numbered, the matrix $W$ holds the edge weights: $W_{u, v} = w_{u,v}$, and thus is symmetric. $D$ is a diagonal matrix where $D_{u,u} = \sum_{v \in V} w_{u,v}$. The edge weights $w_{u,v}$ can for example be defined as follows: $w_{u,v} = \exp(\| I(u) - I(v) \|_2^2/\sigma^2)$ if superpixels $u$ and $v$ have a common border, $w_{u,v} = 0$ otherwise. In this case, $I(u)$ denotes the color vector of the superpixel corresponding to node $u$ (this may be the mean color of the superpixel). The second smallest eigenvector needs to be discretized. Therefore, Shi et al. choose a threshold value minimizing the normalized cut. Further details can be found in the paper. Code is available online: original MatLab code and an implementation by Gori to generate superpixels.

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