mDBSCAN: Real Time Superpixel Segmentation by DBSCAN
Clustering based on Boundary Term
Hasan Almassri
1,2
, Tim Dackermann
2
and Norbert Haala
1
1
Institute for Photogrammetry, University of Stuttgart, Germany
2
Robert Bosch GmbH Company, Reutlingen, Germany
Keywords: Clustering, Real Time, Superpixel, Segmentation.
Abstract: mDBSCAN is an improved version of DBSCAN (Density Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with
Noise) superpixel segmentation. Unlike DBSCAN algorithm, the proposed algorithm has an automatic
threshold based on the colour and gradient information. The proposed algorithm performs under different
colour space such as RGB, Lab and grey images using a novel distance measurement. The experimental results
demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state of the art algorithms in terms of boundary
adherence and segmentation accuracy with low computational cost (30 frames/s).
1 INTRODUCTION
In these days, superpixels have a great interest in the
field of computer vision and image processing. They
have been widely applied in image segmentation
(Saito et al., 2017) (Lei, 2017) (Zhang et al., 2018),
3D reconstruction (Concha and Civera, 2014) (Kucas
and Margarita, 2017), scene flow (Vogel et al., 2013)
and object tracking (Chan et al., 2015). A superpixel
is a set of pixels that share the same features, for
example, color information, texture features, and
others. Superpixel algorithms are performed as a pre-
processing step in many computer vision applications
in order to reduce the computational time of
subsequent processing without affecting the
performance of the entire system. Therefore, fast
computation superpixel algorithms that provide high
boundary adherence and segmentation accuracy are
preferred.
Many superpixel algorithms have been introduced
such as Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC)
(Achanta et al., 2012), Entropy Rate Superpixel
Segmentation (ERS) (Liu et al., 2011)), Superpixels
Extracted via Energy-Driven Sampling (SEEDS)
(Van et al., 2012), and DBSCAN (Shen et al., 2016).
Different approaches have been followed to
generate superpixels, for example, SLIC deals with
superpixels as an iterative clustering problem. On the
other hand, SEEDS considers the superpixels as an
energy maximization problem, which achieved a
good boundary adherence. Our approach deals with
superpixels as a non-iterative clustering problem.
Moreover, it presents precisely the boundary
adherence by defining a novel simple distance
measurement that considers the boundary
information as well as the color and spatial
information between the superpixel and its neighbors.
All of the approaches are aiming to fulfill the
requirements of superpixels by having regular,
compact and connected superpixels with high
boundary adherence and low computational
complexity.
Fig. 1 shows the superpixel results of the modified
DBSCAN algorithm (mDBSCAN) that have compact
and regular shapes, which precisely represent the
image boundaries as described in section 4.5.
Recently, DBSCAN clustering algorithm (Martin et
al., 1996) has been used to generate the superpixels.
DBSCAN superpixel algorithm achieved the state of
the art algorithms at a substantially smaller
computation cost even for complex images. However,
the DBSCAN algorithm suffers from few limitations
such as it needs to be trained in order to select the
values that describe the relation between the color and
spatial information and to select the suitable threshold
value for the distance measurement. Furthermore, it
works only with RGB images. Thus, it deals with
color and spatial information, which do not perfectly
describe the boundary information.
Therefore, in this paper, we present a modified
version of the DBSCAN algorithm to overcome its
limitations as described above. The proposed
algorithm is used with introducing a novel distance
Almassri, H., Dackermann, T. and Haala, N.
mDBSCAN: Real Time Superpixel Segmentation by DBSCAN Clustering based on Boundary Term.
DOI: 10.5220/0007249302830291
In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM 2019), pages 283-291
ISBN: 978-989-758-351-3
Copyright
c
2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
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