Skip to main content

A Supervised Figure-Ground Segmentation Method Using Genetic Programming

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9028))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Figure-ground segmentation is an important preprocessing phase in many computer vision applications. As different classes of objects require specific segmentation rules, supervised (or top-down) methods, which learn from prior knowledge of objects, are suitable for figure-ground segmentation. However, existing top-down methods, such as model-based and fragment-based ones, involve a lot of human work. As genetic programming (GP) can evolve computer programs to solve problems automatically, it requires less human work. Moreover, since GP contains little human bias, it is possible for GP-evolved methods to obtain better results than human constructed approaches. This paper develops a supervised GP-based segmentation system. Three kinds of simple features, including raw pixel values, six dimension and eleven dimension grayscale statistics, are employed to evolve image segmentors. The evolved segmentors are tested on images from four databases with increasing difficulty, and results are compared with four conventional techniques including thresholding, region growing, clustering, and active contour models. The results show that GP-evolved segmentors perform better than the four traditional methods with consistently good results on both simple and complex images.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Zou, W., Bai, C., Kpalma, K., Ronsin, J.: Online glocal transfer for automatic figure-ground segmentation. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 23(5), 2109–2121 (2014)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Borenstein, E., Ullman, S.: Learning to segment. In: Pajdla, T., Matas, J.G. (eds.) ECCV 2004. LNCS, vol. 3023, pp. 315–328. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Borenstein, E., Ullman, S.: Class-specific, top-down segmentation. In: Heyden, A., Sparr, G., Nielsen, M., Johansen, P. (eds.) ECCV 2002, Part II. LNCS, vol. 2351, pp. 109–122. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Liu, J., Wang, J.: Application of snake model in medical image segmentation. J. Convergence Inf. Technol. 9(1), 105–109 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Liu, C.Y., Iglesias, J.E., Tu, Z.: Deformable templates guided discriminative models for robust 3D brain MRI segmentation. Neuroinformatics 11(4), 447–468 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Borenstein, E., Sharon, E., Ullman, S.: Combining top-down and bottom-up segmentation. In: Proceedings IEEE workshop on Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision, CVPR 2004 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Poli, R., Langdon, W.B., McPhee, N.F.: A Field Guide to Genetic Programming (2008). http://lulu.com

  8. Poli, R.: Genetic Programming for feature detection and image segmentation. In: Fogarty, T.C. (ed.) AISB-WS 1996. LNCS, vol. 1143, pp. 110–125. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Song, A., Ciesielski, V.: Fast texture segmentation using genetic programming. In: The 2003 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, pp. 2126–2133. IEEE (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Song, A., Ciesielski, V.: Texture segmentation by genetic programming. Evol. Comput. 16(4), 461–481 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Singh, T., Nawwaf, K., Mohmmad, D., Rabab, W.: Genetic programming based image segmentation with applications to biomedical object detection. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, pp. 1123–1130. ACM (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Roberts, M.E.: The effectiveness of cost based subtree caching mechanisms in typed genetic programming for image segmentation. In: Raidl, G.R., Cagnoni, S., Cardalda, J.J.R., Corne, D.W., Gottlieb, J., Guillot, A., Hart, E., Johnson, C.G., Marchiori, E., Meyer, J.-A., Middendorf, M. (eds.) EvoIASP 2003, EvoWorkshops 2003, EvoSTIM 2003, EvoROB/EvoRobot 2003, EvoCOP 2003, EvoBIO 2003, and EvoMUSART 2003. LNCS, vol. 2611, pp. 444–454. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Geng, J., Liu, J.: Image texture classification using a multiagent genetic clustering algorithm. In: Evolutionary Computation (CEC), pp. 504–508 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Luke, S.: The ECJ Owner’s Manual (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Picard, R.W., Kabir, T., Liu, F.: Real-time recognition with the entire Brodatz texture database. In: IEEE Conference on CVPR, pp. 638–639 (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Weizmann Horses. http://avaminzhang.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/

  17. The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Homepage. http://pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/

  18. Powers, D.M.: Evaluation: from precision, recall and F-factor to ROC, informedness, markedness correlation. Technical report SIE-07-001, School of Informatics and Engineering, Flinders University, Australia (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Ashburner, J., Friston, K.J.: Unified segmentation. Neuroimage 26(3), 839–851 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Validation. http://research.cs.tamu.edu/prism/lectures/iss/issl13.pdf

  21. Thresholding Segmentation. http://au.mathworks.com/help/images/examples/correcting-nonuniform-illumination.html

  22. Active Contour Based Segmentation. http://au.mathworks.com/help/images/ref/activecontour.htmlbtuep4x-7

  23. Region Growing. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/19084-region-growing

  24. K-means Image Segmentation. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/129300

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuyu Liang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Liang, Y., Zhang, M., Browne, W.N. (2015). A Supervised Figure-Ground Segmentation Method Using Genetic Programming. In: Mora, A., Squillero, G. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9028. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16549-3_40

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16549-3_40

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16548-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16549-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics