Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Information Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ins

Interactive active contour with kernel descriptorR

Hao Li a, Maoguo Gong a,∗, Qiguang Miao b, Bin Wang c
a
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
b
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
c
School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Pixel-wise active contour models usually utilize local edge information and/or region
Received 19 September 2017 statistics. These models are unable to ideally segment real-world objects, especially those
Revised 7 March 2018
in heterogeneous or cluttered images because of a lack of local spatial correlations. To rep-
Accepted 9 March 2018
resent the characteristics of the targets precisely, a kernel-descriptor-based active contour
Available online 16 March 2018
model is proposed to address the problem of a lack of local spatial correlations in image
Keywords: segmentation. First, image patch features are extracted and are clustered into several clus-
Active contour model ters. The initial contour is obtained from user inputs, and then the corresponding template
Kernel descriptor feature sets of the clusters are constructed. Second, we utilize the template feature sets to
Level set formulate our energy functional, subject to a constraint on the total length of the region
Interactive boundaries. Finally, a level set method is employed to estimate the resulting evolution. The
Image segmentation proposed method utilizes the kernel descriptor as the high-dimensional feature and per-
forms well on heterogeneous and cluttered images. Experimental results on real images
suggest a clear superiority of the proposed method.
© 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Active contour models have become popular in recent years and have been applied in many fields [15,32,45,50].
In general, active contour models can be divided into two categories: explicit models [17,36] and implicit models
[11,13,16,25,34,43,44,48]. They evolve a curve to smoothly approach an object’s boundary according to features extracted
from regions and/or edges. However, it remains a challenge to utilize proper image features for various contour evolution
schemes. Among these features, the gradient of images is widely used in the original active contour models; however, it is
not appropriate in the scenario in which no prominent edge exists [22,32]. To address this issue, first- and/or second-order
statistics are utilized to distinguish the foreground and the background [6,9]. Furthermore, parametric and nonparametric
statistical models have been proposed to drive the contour evolution based on the entire probability distribution function
of the partitions [8,18,31].
Active contour models using global statistics do not work well for segmenting heterogeneous objects. Most real-world
images exhibit local spatial correlations between pixel intensities (textures) that violate the independent and identical dis-
tribution (i.i.d.) assumption in global statistical region-based frameworks. Statistical region-based active contours may lead

R
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 61772393), the National Program for Support of Top-notch
Young Professionals of China, and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant no. 2017YFB0802200).
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: gong@ieee.org (M. Gong).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2018.03.016
0020-0255/© 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
54 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

to erroneous segmentations in the cases in which the object to be segmented cannot be easily distinguished in terms of
global statistics. In order to accurately segment these objects, some active contour energies take local strategies into consid-
eration [16,19,23,24]. The limitations of such strategies are that they require fixed and predefined neighborhoods, and the
results are highly dependent on initialization and image type. Wu et al. [46] proposed a novel localizing strategy that can
adaptively choose between global and local information at different locations along the evolving contour, and that works
well on cluttered images. Another way to accurately partition heterogeneous images is to incorporate high-dimensional
features into segmentation frameworks [38,41]. The vector-valued high-dimensional features generally have higher capacity
than scalar-valued features (e.g., gradient, mean, and variance) to represent heterogeneous or cluttered objects. It seems that
vector-valued image features are feasible to incorporate into region- and edge-based segmentation frameworks. For example,
a “color snakes” framework Sapiro [39] was presented by applying vector-valued images into geometric active contours. To
segment texture objects, texture features modeled by random-field frameworks [20] and linear or non-linear filters [35] have
been widely used. Adam et al. [1] assigned each pixel a local histogram based on the distance metrics [8,18,31,49] for mea-
suring the dissimilarity between two histogram-based features. In addition, each pixel can also be represented by adapting
grayscale or RGB neighbor patches to vectors [12,28].
However, it is difficult for high-dimensional features to measure the similarity/dissimilarity between different high-
dimensional region features, which are crucial for constructing energy functionals of the region-based active contour mod-
els. The similarity/dissimilarity is generally measured by distance-based metrics (e.g., Euclidean distance), which becomes
meaningless as the dimension of features increases. It is an urgent task to construct high-dimensional features of high capa-
bility to represent object accurately, and simultaneously formulate a corresponding similarity/dissimilarity metric for better
efficiency to compute the distance between two obtained features.
The kernel descriptor, as a state-of-the-art image representation, provides an approach to solve the above dilemma. Bo
et al. [4] highlighted the kernel view of orientation histograms (e.g., the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) [27] and
histograms of oriented gradients (HOGs) [10]) and extended it to gradient, color, and shape pixel attributes. Kernel descrip-
tors proposed by Bo et al. are able to measure the similarity of image patches accurately [4]. Furthermore, it is difficult for
pure automatic methods to extract desired contents. As a consequence, interactive image segmentation has emerged and has
received much attention in recent years. Interactive segmentation frameworks involve human guidance via small amounts of
foreground and background user seeds or strokes to indicate the foreground and the background regions in advance. Popular
interactive segmentation algorithms include active contour models and graph-based methods [14,37]. However, the user in-
puts of active contour models are generally weak, i.e., rectangular or circular curves surround the objects. These loose seeds
are not able to exactly describe the characteristics of the targets, which may lead to inaccurate classification in cluttered
images. Recently, some precursors have tried to dispose of the predicaments in creative ways [12,26,33,40].
In this paper, we couple the kernel descriptors for image characteristics with active contour evolution into an interac-
tive segmentation framework termed a kernel-descriptor-based active contour (KDAC). The KDAC procedure is depicted as
follows. In KDAC, a natural image is covered by non-overlapping square patches. For each patch, a corresponding patch fea-
ture is extracted by a color kernel descriptor. Based on the obtained dense patch features, we coarsely partition the patches
into several clusters. Then, the user inputs will point out the foreground and background to provide the initial contours.
The clustering results can also help construct template feature sets corresponding to the categories. We then formulate our
energy functional and refine it by adding the color edge detector and balloon force. Experiments show the strength of the
proposed technique in accurately segmenting natural images. In addition, our method performs better than other frequently
used features, i.e., RGB patch and histogram patch features.
The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) We are the first, to our knowledge, to incorporate the kernel descriptor
proposed by Bo et al. [4] into the interactive active contour model. (2) A novel region function is defined by comparing the
similarities between the pixel and its neighbor regions’ inside and outside contours. (3) We demonstrate that the proposed
KDAC works well on the Berkeley segmentation dataset (BSDS). Note that KDAC achieves the highest accuracies in the sta-
tistical sense. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review several recent novel active contour methods. A brief
introduction of kernel descriptor is also given in this section. In Section 3, we present the energy functional of the KDAC and
derive the corresponding gradient flow. The experimental studies described in Section 4 show the feasibility of the KDAC in
segmenting natural images, and compare the performance of our model with several existing methods and two frequently
used high-dimensional features. We summarizes the paper and give conclusions in Section 4.

2. Related background

2.1. Active-contour-based interactive segmentation

In active contour models, an initial contour is placed near the object. The algorithms evolve the contour to the desired
boundary. Different terms in the energy functional, typically a data term and length regularization term, are used to attain
different effects for the tasks. The early paper by Kass et al. [17] incorporated user interaction (an initial curve placed near
the desired object boundary). Recently, graph-based methods were widely used in the field of image processing. Nguyen
et al. [33] applied a continuous-domain convex active contour as a refinement stage to the initial contour generated by
interactive graph-based cutout methods (the GrabCut [37], geodesic [3], or random walks [14] methods) and achieved a
robust convex active contour (RCAC). Their energy functional unites region information and local features from the prepro-
 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 55

cessing stage. It ensures that the curve evolution does not drift too far from the initial contour, complies with the user
input, reflects the user intention, and snaps the contour to geometry features. In addition, the integration of a graph-based
method with a convex active contour improves the robustness of the methodology with different user inputs and different
initializations. Schoenemann et al. [40] completed a global interactive active contour with emphasis on their powerful cur-
vature penalization. They start from a new formulation of length-based optimization schemes. The formulation is based on
surface continuation constraints and considers basic regions and boundary elements. The corresponding optimization prob-
lem is cast as an integer linear program. The method is then extended to include curvature regularity. Their experiments
show that the curvature regularity is much better suited in the presence of long and thin objects compared with standard
length regularity. The authors of [12] proposed a sparse texture active contour (STAC). Its first stage is to construct texture
and patch-wise overcomplete dictionaries using some user drawings over the image. Then, the foreground and background
reconstruction errors for the dictionaries and a new image patch are calculated through sparse representation. Their differ-
ence formulates the active contour energy. The overcomplete texture feature dictionaries and the sparse representations of
an image patch on the dictionaries facilitate the successes of the STAC.

2.2. Kernel descriptor

Superb image segmentation for real-world images usually depends on high-dimensional vector-valued image features.
However, the high-dimensional features make it difficult to select appropriate distance metrics to measure the similarity
between the features. A kernel descriptor gives consideration to both efficiency and theoretical rationality. Therefore, it is a
good choice to incorporate a kernel descriptor into our high-dimensional-feature-based active contour. Bo et al. [4] proposed
the kernel view of orientation histograms that are successfully utilized in object recognition, and extended it to gradient,
color, and shape pixel attributes. Here, we consider a color kernel descriptor that will be incorporated into our model. The
similarity of color image patches is calculated by a match kernel:

Kcolor (P, Q ) = kc (c (z ), c (z ))k p (z, z ), (1)
z∈P z ∈Q

where
kc (c (z ), c (z )) = exp(−γc c (z ) − c (z )2 ) (2)
and
k p (z, z ) = exp(−γ p z − z 2 ). (3)
Kcolor (P, Q) is the match kernel between image patches P and Q. c(z) is the pixel color at position z (intensity for grayscale
images and RGB values for color images). kc (c(z), c(z )) and kp (z, z ) are Gaussian kernel over pixel color values and pixel
positions, respectively. γ c and γ p are constants.
For the purpose of learning compact patch features and computing the match kernel efficiently, the kernels in Eq. (1) are
rewritten as inner products kc (c (z ), c (z )) = φc (c (z ))T φc (c (z )) and k p (z, z ) = φ p (z )T φ p (z ). Then, the patch features can be
derived:

Fcolor (P ) = φc (c(z ))  φ p (z ), (4)
z∈P

Fcolor (Q ) = φc (c(z ))  φ p (z ), (5)
z  ∈Q

where  is the Kronecker product. Therefore, the match kernel of color image patches is rewritten as
Kcolor (P, Q ) = Fcolor (P )T Fcolor (Q ). (6)
Eqs. (4) and (5) provide compact and exact patch features derived from the match kernel. Moreover, the linear match
kernel in Eq. (6) is convenient for calculating the similarity between patch features. In contrast to histogram patch feature,
a color kernel descriptor incorporates spatial information of pixels, which enhances the correlations between pixels in the
patch. For a color patch feature, the way of directly stacking the columns of a patch into a vector for every channel is
utilized. Usually, principal component analysis (PCA) is added to reduce its dimension. The match kernel in Eq. (1) evalu-
ates the similarity between P and Q through a Gaussian kernel, which simultaneously guarantees the intensity and spatial
correlations of the color kernel descriptor.

3. Methodology

In this section, the proposed KDAC is described in detail. First, the image is segmented into non-overlapping patches. We
extract their patch features and cluster the patches into many regions belonging to several categories. The regions marked
by the red user strokes are designed as foreground regions. Second, we formulate the kernel-descriptor-based active contour
model with the patch-feature templates obtained by clustering results, and then deduce the corresponding gradient flow.
Finally, because some misclassified patches may lead to inaccurate segmentation results, we add blue strokes to sign the
misclassified patches to the background and modify the initial contour and energy functional to refine the segmentation.
56 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Fig. 1. Process of achieving the initial contour. (a) Original image. (b) Clustering result. (c) User input (the red strokes mark the object region). (d) Fore-
ground region (the white part) and background region (the black part). (e) Initial contour. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure
legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

3.1. Contour initialization

An image is denoted by a vector function I :  ⊂ R2 → Rd (d ∈ N ), where d = 1 for grayscale images and d = 3 for color
images, and the image domain is covered by M dense but non-overlapping patches {Pi , i = 1, 2, · · · , M}. Each square patch
contains h × h pixels. For each patch, a corresponding patch feature is extracted by the color kernel descriptor methods de-
scribed in Section 2. The image is coarsely represented by M patch features { f (Pi ), i = 1, 2, · · · , M} in Rl , where l is the
dimension of the patch feature. In order to realize the coarse initialization from the patch features, a weighted graph,
G = (V, E, W ), is built, where V denotes the set of M nodes of the graph corresponding to M patch features, and E⊆V × V de-
notes the set of edges between nodes. W ∈ RM×M is a symmetric similarity matrix representing the weights of the edges. It
is simple to obtain W because of the convenience and efficiency of kernel descriptors to compute their similarities through
an inner product. Then, spectral clustering is used to cluster the M patch features into n subsets. After clustering, we ob-
tain n subsets from the M patch features. Each subset contains several patch features belonging to the same pattern. n
categories represent n patterns in the image. In general, the numbers of patch features in diverse categories have large
differences. For each pattern, overmuch patch features are unnecessary. Therefore, we randomly sample K patch feature
sets from each category to build n template feature sets. The template feature sets are defined by T = {T1 , · · · , Tn }, where
T j = { f (Q j1 ), f (Q j2 ), · · · , f (Q jK )} denotes the template feature set of the jth category. {f(Qj1 ), f(Qj2 ), , f(QjK )} are K samples
from the patch features of the jth category, and {Qj1 , Qj2 , , QjK } represent template image patches sampled from the jth
category. Then, the red strokes are used to mark the foreground regions. Obviously, the other regions are background. The
demarcation line between the coarsely classified foreground and background is the initial contour for the latter evolution.
The process of achieving the initial contour is shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1(a) is a sea star image and (b) shows the clustering
results. As shown in Fig. 1, we use red strokes to indicate the foreground regions. The regions marked by the red strokes
are labeled as coarse foreground and other regions are labeled as background. Therefore, the initial contour shown in (e) is
the demarcation line between them.

3.2. Proposed kernel-descriptor-based active contour model

The regions partitioned by clustering are labeled by their category marks. The label of a region belonging to the jth
category is denoted L j = j ( j = 1, 2, · · · , n ). Let C denote a closed contour that evolves to approach the boundary of the
object during iterations. We consider a pixel x = (x, y ) on C and represent it by a patch feature f(p(x)), where p(x) is an
h × h patch with a center at x. To simplify the situation, we take an x that has two neighbor regions labeled by LC _in (x ) and
LC _out (x ) into account.
The similarity between x and the neighbor region inside the contour is defined by patch match kernels between p(x)
and the template patches QLC_in (x ) :


K
S(x, LC _in (x )) = Kcolor ( p(x ), QLC_in (x )t ). (7)
t=1
 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 57

Then, Eq. (6) and the template feature set of LC _in are substituted into Eq. (7):

K
S(x, LC _in (x )) = Kcolor ( p(x ), QLC_in (x )t )
t=1


K
= f ( p(x ))T f (QLC_in (x )t )
t=1

= f ( p(x ))T TLC_in (x ) . (8)
In the same way, the similarity between x and the neighbor region outside the contour is calculated by

S(x, LC _out (x )) = f ( p(x ))T TLC_out (x ) . (9)
In [5,33], a convex active contour model is introduced, which is expressed as
 
min J (u ) = Dudx + λ |∇ u|dx, (10)
 
where u is fuzzy membership function on image domain , which receives a value between 0 and 1 at each pixel. The
function D in the first term is a region function that measures the inside and outside regions. The second term is the total
variation norm of the function u, which is recommended in [5]. λ is a positive constant. In this paper, we define the function
D as
D(x ) = −S(x, LC _in (x )) + S(x, LC _out (x )). (11)
The smaller D(x) is, the more the pixel x is considered as the inside neighbor region. The higher D(x) is, the more the pixel
x is considered as the outside neighbor region.
A minimizer C will be obtained when the curve C is on the boundary of the object. Then, the pseudo-zero level-set
function of u(x) is expressed as

C = {x ∈  : u ( x ) = t }
inside(C ) = {x ∈  : u(x ) > t } (12)
outside(C ) = {x ∈  : u(x ) < t },
where the segmented region is found by thresholding the function u(x) with t, which is typically set to 0.5 [13,33].
It is necessary to discuss the way to infer LC _in (x ) and LC _out (x ) according to the pixel x due to the importance of choosing
template feature sets directly determined by the two labels. We apply a k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm to address this
issue. k-NN is a simple but efficient machine-learning algorithm used for classification and regression. In the classification
phase, k is a user-defined constant, and an unlabeled vector (a query or test point) is classified by assigning the label that
is most frequent among the k training samples nearest that query point. In our model, the query point is the pixel x, and
we define a local region with k = r × r pixels and the center at x. The majority of the intersection of the local region and
the region inside the contour vote for LC _in (x ), and LC _out (x ) is obtained in the same way. In order to keep the inferences
working well, we update the labels of the pixels on C at the end of each generation. When the contour expands, LC _in (x ) is
assigned as the label of the pixel x. Conversely, LC _out (x ) is assigned to the pixel x. As shown in Fig. 2, we cut out a part
of the sea star image and briefly explain how to infer LC _in (x ) and LC _out (x ). The white curve is the evolution curve and A,B
are pixels on it. For pixel A, the case is simple. In the local region, A’s inside label is only label 1 and its outside label is
only label 2. For pixel B, the outside labels are labels 2 and 3. Therefore, we must compute the similarities between B and
label 2, and between B and label 3. Finally, we choose the label that is more similar to B as LC _out (B ).

3.3. Refinement of the proposed model

Some drawbacks still exist in the above model. First, high-dimensional patch features do enhance the capability of de-
scribing the region patterns and reduce the harmful effect of noise. Nevertheless, they are insensitive to the edges. The final
contour will stay near, but not exactly at, the real boundary. However, in the initialization, only inside red strokes marking
the desired regions are utilized. However, if a part of the background shares the same pattern with the adjacent foreground,
the part will be assigned to the foreground (Fig. 3(a)). Adhering to other interactive methods, we need some blue strokes
to mark some regions as the background (Fig. 3(b)). The problem caused by the blue strokes is that the labels inside and
outside the pixels on the evolution curve may be the same. Eq. (10) becomes pointless when driving the curve to the real
boundary (Fig. 4).
In order to solve the above two problems, we revise our energy function as
 
min J (u ) = g · (D + c )udx + λ |∇ u|dx, (13)
 
where g(x) is an edge detection function and c is a constant. We define g(x) as
1
g( x ) = , (14)
1 + |∇ IRGB (x )|2
58 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Fig. 2. A window cutting out from the sea star is shown. It has three categories (the yellow, green, and red regions). This figure is drawn to explain how
the neighbor labels of the contour pixels (the pixels at the center of patches A and B) are determined. (For interpretation of the references to color in this
figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 3. Images are shown to explain the necessity of adding blue strokes that mark the background. (a) Only using red strokes, two parts of the background
are misclassified as foreground. (b) Inaccurate boundaries are marked by blue strokes. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend,
the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 59

Fig. 4. After adding blue strokes, the contour pixel (at the center of patch C) has the same inside and outside labels. Therefore, the data term in our energy
functions has no capacity to drive the curve to the real boundaries. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred
to the web version of this article.)

where ∇ IRGB denotes the RGB gradient of the image, which was designed for detecting boundaries of a vector field in [21].
It is less sensitive to noise and more valid than the scalar gradient. The edge-detection function surmounts the smooth
characteristic of high-dimensional features and makes the contour stay at the boundaries. The constant c is a balloon force
[7]. The purpose of adding the balloon force is to drive the curve pixels having the same LC _in (x ) and LC _out (x ) where the
data term D(x) cannot work.

3.4. Level-set evolution of proposed model

A level-set method is used to solve the energy functional. The pseudo-level-set function u(x) that minimizes the energy
functional (13) satisfies the Euler-Lagrange equation. Therefore, we can obtain the evolving equation by utilizing the gradient
descent flow,
∂u ∂J
=− , (15)
∂t ∂u
and obtain the iteration formula of the energy functional,
∂J
un+1 = un − t , (16)
∂u
where un is the pseudo-level-set function in the nth iteration. Since un+1 takes its values in [0,1], we simply set un+1 = 1
when un+1 > 1 and un+1 = 0 when un+1 < 0 for exceptions.
Next, we further deduce the gradient flow of the contour through the first variation of the proposed energy:
 
∂J ∇u
= g · (D + c ) − λdiv . (17)
∂u |∇ u|
The proposed-kernel-descriptor based active contour model for segmenting natural images is shown in Algorithm 1. We
partition the image into non-overlapping patches and extract the patch features based on the kernel descriptor. Then, the
initial contour and template feature sets are constructed. The level-set function is iteratively updated to obtain satisfactory
results. In general global two-class active contour models, the assumption that the foreground and background possess
different patterns is made. However, for most natural images, the objects always share parts of their patterns with the
backgrounds. A kernel descriptor enhances the correlations between pixels in the patch by incorporating spatial information
of the pixels. In this paper, this local strategy is used in our coarse initialization and the evolution of active contour, which
is a reasonable way to segment natural images.

4. Experimental study

In this section, in order to assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, we experiment on several images from the
Berkeley Segmentation Dataset [29]. In the experiments, we compare the proposed method with GrabCut [37] and RCAC [33].
60 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Fig. 5. Segmentation procedure of KDAC. (a), (e), and (i): Original images with user inputs. (b), (f), and (j): Clustering results. (c), (g), and (k): Initial
contours. (d), (h), and (l): Segmentation results.

Fig. 6. Average values of PRI, GCE, VI, and Covering with different patch sizes (r = 5, 7, 9, and 11). Results are averaged over 50 runs.

Algorithm 1 Proposed KDAC algorithm.

1: Step 1) Extract the patch features based on the kernel descriptor proposed by Bo et~al. [4].
2: Step 2) Obtain the initial contour with the user strokes and construct template feature sets.
3: Step 3) Initialize the level-set function u0 and set n=0.
4: Step 4) Obtain un+1 by Eq.(16).
5: Step 5) If either the convergence of the energy functional in Eq.(13) is reached or n exceeds a predefined maximum
number of iterations, then stop the algorithm.
 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 61

Fig. 7. KDAC cost time. Results are averaged over 50 runs. (a) Feature extraction, (b) spectral clustering, (c) segmentation, and (d) total time.

The GrabCut algorithm is one of the interactive segmentation methods based on the graph-cuts technique. The user needs to
mark certain pixels as objects and the graph cuts are used to find the globally optimal segmentation. The GrabCut approach
employs a Gaussian mixture model and iteratively alternates between estimation and parameter learning to solve the min-
cut problem. In the RCAC method, the region-based method is used in the first step to generate an initial contour, and
the convex active contour is then applied in the second step to optimize the contour. Moreover, we apply other frequently
used patch-wise features (such as the RGB patch feature in [28] and histogram patch feature in [12]) to our framework
and compare them with the kernel descriptor. Generally, these interactive algorithms depend on the way user draws the
initial seeds or strokes. Therefore in this section we give some explicit details of the user interaction. In order to achieve a
consistent comparison, the same initialization is used for each of the methods.
In order to objectively evaluate our method, we use four supervised well-known metrics to verify the performance of the
proposed technique, such as the probabilistic Rand index (PRI) [42], the global consistency error (GCE) [30], the variation of
information (VI) [47], and the segmentation covering (Covering) [2]. PRI measures the fraction of pixel pairs whose labels are
consistent between the segmentation result and the ground truth. When the segmentation result and the ground truth are
actually the same, the PRI value is equal to 1. GCE computes the degree to which two segmentations are mutually consistent.
The smaller value of GCE represents the better segmentation result. The VI metric defines the distance between the result
segmentation and the ground-truth segmentation, which is used to measure the actual segmentation results relative to the
variation of information of the reference segmented image. The smaller the value of VI, the better the segmentation result.
Covering measures the covering of two segmentations. The higher the value of Covering, the better the segmentation result.
In this paper, the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset (BSDS) is used, which contains 500 images [2]. Note that the following
experiments were performed on a computer with an Intel Core 2.30-GHz CPU and 2GB of memory.

4.1. Experimental setup

Our proposed method has a few parameters, including n, K, λ, and r. The number of categories after clustering, n, is
chosen subjectively based upon our qualitative assessment of the segmented images. We empirically set K to be 100 in our
experiments. The parameter λ allows the user to control the scale and smoothness of the segmentation, and is set to be 0.5
empirically. The selection of the patch size r will be discussed later.

4.1.1. KDAC segmentation procedure

As shown in Fig. 5, three real-world images are segmented by the proposed method. The first column shows the orig-
inal images with the red and blue strokes, which respectively indicate the foreground and background regions. Then, the
62 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Fig. 8. Results with different numbers of clusters (n = 3, 5, 7, and 9).

 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 63

Fig. 9. Results of PRI, GCE, VI, and Covering with different numbers of clusters (n = 3, 5, 7 ,and 9).

Table 1
Results of the proposed method with different ratios.

Ratio PRI GCE VI Covering Time(s) Mean

Mean Std( × 104 ) Mean Std( × 104 ) Mean Std( × 104 ) Mean Std( × 104 )

0.02 0.9731 2.0595 0.0237 1.8340 0.1696 10.4915 0.9846 1.1712 106.2
0.04 0.9728 2.2741 0.0252 1.8084 0.1781 9.9812 0.9844 1.2967 117.3
0.06 0.9734 1.8684 0.0246 1.4165 0.1744 7.3931 0.9847 1.0615 134.5
0.08 0.9763 1.1347 0.0222 0.9174 0.1616 4.9881 0.9864 0.6464 146.0
0.1 0.9709 3.6546 0.0266 2.8545 0.1862 15.5222 0.9833 2.0841 153.1
0.12 0.9739 1.9477 0.0243 1.5302 0.1745 7.9709 0.9850 1.1091 163.9
0.14 0.9730 1.8964 0.0250 1.4871 0.1767 7.8861 0.9845 1.0803 169.5
0.16 0.9753 1.4844 0.0231 1.1331 0.1677 5.7718 0.9859 0.8425 174.4
0.18 0.9731 1.9849 0.0236 1.6701 0.1692 9.6156 0.9846 1.1302 182.1
0.2 0.9754 1.7691 0.0230 1.4297 0.1667 8.0863 0.9859 1.0078 195.9
0.22 0.9743 2.2198 0.0239 1.6808 0.1710 8.1483 0.9853 1.2608 205.2
0.24 0.9736 2.2386 0.0244 1.7850 0.1737 9.6238 0.9849 1.2763 213.6
0.26 0.9743 2.7123 0.0238 2.1651 0.1699 11.6225 0.9853 1.5460 217.7
0.28 0.9737 2.0312 0.0244 1.5738 0.1736 7.9347 0.9849 1.1559 228.4
0.3 0.9739 2.0636 0.0242 1.6907 0.1729 9.5880 0.9850 1.1785 236.4

patch features are extracted by using the kernel descriptor. The second column shows the clustering results by applying the
spectral clustering technique. The three binary images shown in the third column are obtained by analysis of the cluster-
ing results and user inputs. These binary images are the initial contours for the latter evolution. Then, the proposed active
contour energy is minimized to segment the original images. The segmentation results are shown in the last column.

4.1.2. Test of patch size

In this paper, a patch with r × r pixels is defined in the proposed active contour model. This parameter may affect the
segmentation accuracy and cost time. In this experiment, the value of r is set to 5, 7, 9, and 11 separately. The values of
PRI, GCE, VI, and Covering at r = 5, 7, 9 ,and 11 are shown in Fig. 6. The results obtained by the proposed method on the
image of the sea star are averaged over 50 realizations. When the parameter r is not appropriate, the initial contour is far
from the object boundaries. If the value of r is large, the initial contour is not smooth and has many sawtooth edges. If the
value of r is too small, the feature extractor cannot obtain efficient features because the patch misses a significant amount
of information. Fig. 7 shows the cost time of the proposed KDAC on the image of the sea star. From Fig. 7(a), the values of
time for feature extraction with different patch sizes are less than 1 s. Therefore, the patch size has a small influence on
the time for feature extraction. However, as shown in Fig. 7(b), the time for spectral clustering with r =5 is 20 times larger
64 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Fig. 10. Segmentation results of mushroom image. (a) User inputs. Results by (b) GrabCut, (c) RCAC, (d) RGB patch feature, (e) histogram patch feature,
and (f) KDAC.

than that for spectral clustering with r =7. The values of time for spectral clustering with r = 7, 9, and 11 are less than 20 s.
As shown in Figs. 6 and 7, we obtain satisfactory results by using the patch with 9 × 9.

4.1.3. Test of number of clusters

In the proposed method, spectral clustering is used to cluster the M patch features into n subsets. Before clustering, the
number of clusters should be predefined. Fig. 8 shows the results on the image of the mushroom with different number of
clusters (n = 3, 5, 7 and 9). The first column shows the original images with the user inputs. The second column gives the
clustering results with n = 3, 5, 7 and 9, respectively. The results of initial contours with different clusters are shown in the
third column. The last column exhibits the final segmentation results. It can be observed that the proposed method with
different number of clusters can obtain satisfactory results, i.e., KDAC is not sensitive to the number of clusters. Fig. 9 ex-
hibits the results of PRI, GCE, VI and Covering with different number of clusters (n = 3, 5, 7, and 9). The RCAC algorithm
is selected as the baseline method. Obviously, in most cases, the results of the proposed method are better than those of
the baseline method. The clustering results have influence on the generation of initial contour, but the proposed method
can evolve the initial contour into the real boundaries. Therefore, the final results obtained by the proposed method with
different numbers of clusters do not exhibit much difference. In this paper, the number of clusters n is set to [5,9].

4.1.4. Test of random selection

In the proposed method, we randomly sample K patch sets from each category to build template feature sets. In the
experiments, the ratio of the selected patches to all of the patches is in [0.02,0.3]. Table 1 shows the values of PRI, GCE,
VI, and Covering of the proposed method on the image of the mushroom with different ratios. As shown in Table 1, the
values of standard deviation are small. The mean values with different ratios do not exhibit much difference. In general, we
are able to get more accurate results with a higher ratio. However, as shown in the last column, the cost time will increase
when we select more patches to construct the template feature sets.
 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 65

Fig. 11. Segmentation results of boy image. (a) User inputs. Results by (b) GrabCut, (c) RCAC, (d) RGB patch feature, (e) histogram patch feature, and (f)
KDAC.

4.2. Comparison with other algorithms

We first test our method on a relatively “clear” target in Fig. 10. The pattern of the mushroom is onefold and it is easy
to recognize the mushroom from its background. The result given by GrabCut misclassifies a part of the mushroom canopy’s
margin and a block near the root because GrabCut is sensitive to the user strokes and lacks region information. The RCAC
method gives a better segmentation result compared with other algorithms. Our method, based on a kernel descriptor and
patch-wise features, achieves similar results and captures most of the mushroom. The boundary of the mushroom canopy
obtained by the proposed algorithm is smoother than those obtained by GrabCut and RCAC.
The segmentation results of a real-world image of a boy is shown in Fig. 11. Human beings in natural images are usually
the targets that we desire to segment. The difficulty of segmenting such objects does not result from the skin colors or
appearances, but from the diverse characteristics of the clothes and accessories. The boy wears a yellow hula skirt and
is decked out in grass rings on his head, arms, and ankles, which makes it difficult to represent the object completely.
In (d), (e), and (f), the high-dimensional features all give acceptable results. However, near the boy’s left arm and hand,
it is observed that these three methods cannot accurately converge to the real boundary. This may be due to the fact
that that location is similar to its contiguous background. More specific tuning on blue strokes is needed to realize better
segmentations. The GrabCut and RCAC methods also provide nice segmentations. The results for the mushroom and boy
images preliminarily demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model. The successful results may depend on the regular
characteristics and clear region boundaries of the two test objects.
Fig. 12 shows the segmentation results obtained by the five methods on a real-world image of the sea star. This image is
chosen in order to test the performance of the proposed method on textured images. For human visual perception, the sea
star in Fig. 12 can also be easily distinguished. The texture pattern of the sea-star body differs greatly from the texture of the
sea plant. However, GrabCut, RGB patch feature, and histogram patch feature miss some parts of the sea-star legs. The user
strokes may be too small to mark the legs as a part of the target, but the image brightness of the legs is darker and more
similar to that of the sea plant. RCAC incorporates region information and local features from the graph-based preprocessing
66 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Fig. 12. Segmentation results of sea star image. (a) User inputs. Results by (b) GrabCut, (c) RCAC, (d) RGB patch feature, (e) histogram patch feature, and
(f) KDAC.

Fig. 13. Segmentation results of tiger image. (a) User inputs. Results by (b) GrabCut, (c) RCAC, (d) RGB patch feature, (e) histogram patch feature, and (f)
KDAC.

stage. Therefore, its segmentation is more accurate than that of the other methods. KDAC has a more powerful capacity than
RGB and histogram patch features to represent the sea-star texture, and also gives a better result.
Fig. 13 presents a visual comparison between the five segmentation results of the tiger image obtained by different
algorithms. Note that the left leg of the tiger is marked by the red user strokes. This image is selected for two reasons. First,
the body of the tiger is covered by irregular black stripes, which are similar to the dark water. The black stripes may result
in a local solution. Second, we desire to evaluate how the algorithm performs on difficult long narrow structures, i.e., the
tail of the tiger, which is not marked by the user strokes in (a). As shown in Fig. 13, the four methods fail to capture the
tail, except for KDAC. The left leg of the tiger is separated from the body of the tiger by GrabCut and KDAC. The proposed
model represents the pattern of the tiger image well and obtains a better result compared with the other four methods.
Figs. 14 and 15 show the segmentation results obtained on two natural images of a koala and a bear, respectively. The
two images are of a similar type as the previous ones, but their textures are heterogeneous. From a visual analysis of these
figures, the koala’s gray fur is always accompanied by the irregular white fur at the auricular fossae, below the mouth,
below the four limbs, and on its belly. In contrast, the texture of the bears image is onefold, but the rushing water in the
background of the bears image is irregular and cluttered. In the two examples, neither RGB patch feature nor histogram
patch feature obtain desirable results. It can be seen that KDAC captures the bears accurately, but misses the leg edges of
the little bears because the high-dimensional features are insensitive to small and narrow concave edges. In addition, the
cluttered patterns across the junctional zone of legs and water lead to inaccurate color gradients that are crucial to drive
the curve to the real boundary. However, the proposed method has better results for segmenting the mouth and the right
leg of the big bear.
Figs. 16 and 17 show the segmentation results obtained on two natural images of a leopard and an owl, respectively.
The two images have more challenging objects to segment. Even for human eyes, Figs. 16 and 17 are difficult to segment.
 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 67

Fig. 14. Segmentation results of koala image. (a) User inputs. Results by (b) GrabCut, (c) RCAC, (d) RGB patch feature, (e) histogram patch feature, and (f)
KDAC.

Table 2
PRI values of competing algorithms. The larger value of PRI represents
the better segmentation result.

Figure GrabCut RCAC RGB Histogram KDAC

Mushroom 0.9158 0.9650 0.9666 0.9661 0.9713

Boy 0.9406 0.9340 0.9279 0.9306 0.9381
Koala 0.9045 0.9100 0.8601 0.8308 0.9118
Owl 0.6259 0.9483 0.9657 0.9477 0.9764
Sea star 0.8047 0.9686 0.8620 0.8317 0.9600
Tiger 0.9452 0.9514 0.9310 0.9491 0.9421
Bears 0.9311 0.9315 0.8529 0.8649 0.9279
Leopard 0.9428 0.9625 0.9617 0.9573 0.9664
Mean 0.8763 0.9464 0.9160 0.9098 0.9493

A good segmentation needs to exactly extract the texture information of the objects. Moreover, in these two test images,
the cluttered backgrounds share similar or even the same pattern with the objects, i.e., the tree trunk the leopard squats
on and the vines the owl stands on. As shown in these figures, the proposed KDAC accurately captures the two targets. The
GrabCut and RCAC methods are sensitive to the user seeds.
The results of the objective evaluation for these eight images are presented in Tables 2–5. The proposed KDAC performs
best or second best in all experiments in segmenting the natural images. It can be observed that our method ranks first for
the mean values of PRI, GCE, VI, and Covering. Owing to the rules of the metrics mentioned above, it is easy to conclude
that KDAC is efficient and effective.
The proposed method can obtain satisfactory results when the images have multiple objects and these objects have a
similar appearance. Fig. 18 shows the images with multiple objects. We can use the red and blue strokes to indicate the
foreground and background. The proposed method can obtain the interested objects accurately. Then, a statistical test is
carried out on the BSDS using the above four different criteria. We only selected images that clearly can be segmented
68 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Fig. 15. Segmentation results of bears image. (a) User inputs. Results by (b) GrabCut, (c) RCAC, (d) RGB patch feature, (e) histogram patch feature, and (f)
KDAC.

Fig. 16. Segmentation results of leopard image. (a) User inputs. Results by)(b) GrabCut, (c) RCAC, (d) RGB patch feature, (e) histogram patch feature, and
(f) KDAC.

Table 3
GCE values of competing algorithms. The smaller value of GCE represents
the better segmentation result.

Figure GrabCut RCAC RGB Histogram KDAC

Mushroom 0.0661 0.0321 0.0314 0.0316 0.0269

Boy 0.0547 0.0596 0.0645 0.0627 0.0555
Koala 0.0922 0.0875 0.1351 0.1616 0.0876
Owl 0.1536 0.0465 0.0324 0.0489 0.0229
Sea Star 0.1775 0.0310 0.1160 0.1299 0.0392
Tiger 0.0525 0.0472 0.0619 0.0478 0.0552
Bears 0.0627 0.0617 0.1376 0.1271 0.0652
Leopard 0.0527 0.0353 0.0336 0.0402 0.0314
Mean 0.0890 0.0501 0.0766 0.0812 0.0480

into two classes to avoid potential ambiguities. Some segmentation results obtained by the proposed algorithm are given in
Fig. 19. Table 6 shows the statistical results of the supervised objective evaluation of the five algorithms on 50 BSDS test
images. These statistics indicate that our approach can achieve the highest accuracies in the statistical sense when compared
with the other methods.
 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 69

Fig. 17. Segmentation results of owl image. (a) User inputs. Results by (b) GrabCut, (c) RCAC, (d) RGB patch feature, (e) histogram patch feature and (f)
KDAC.

Table 4
VI values of competing algorithms. The smaller value of VI represents the
better segmentation result.

Figure GrabCut RCAC RGB Histogram KDAC

Mushroom 0.4043 0.2205 0.2208 0.2210 0.1925

Boy 0.3550 0.3804 0.4074 0.3978 0.3563
Koala 0.5491 0.5294 0.7499 0.8626 0.5332
Owl 1.1455 0.3083 0.2258 0.3155 0.1691
Sea Star 0.9327 0.2271 0.6632 0.7406 0.2757
Tiger 0.3400 0.3101 0.3935 0.3159 0.3546
Bears 0.3917 0.3830 0.7454 0.7001 0.4046
Leopard 0.3341 0.2400 0.2308 0.2663 0.2193
Mean 0.5565 0.3249 0.4546 0.4775 0.3132

Table 5
Covering values of competing algorithms. The larger value of Covering
represents the better segmentation result.

Figure GrabCut RCAC RGB Histogram KDAC

Mushroom 0.7414 0.8754 0.8790 0.8778 0.8956

Boy 0.8232 0.8075 0.7919 0.7980 0.8196
Koala 0.8682 0.8748 0.7953 0.7718 0.8742
Owl 0.2802 0.7860 0.8426 0.7689 0.8932
Sea Star 0.6328 0.9408 0.7219 0.6525 0.9252
Tiger 0.8235 0.8410 0.7665 0.8284 0.8150
Bears 0.8427 0.8443 0.6668 0.6915 0.8363
Leopard 0.7269 0.8069 0.8195 0.7835 0.8337
Mean 0.7174 0.8471 0.7854 0.7716 0.8616
70 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72

Fig. 18. Images having multiple objects that have a similar appearance.

Table 6
Statistical results of objective evaluation using 50 BSDS test images.

Method PRI ↑ GCE ↓ VI ↓ Covering ↑

GrabCut Mean 0.8617 0.0966 0.6030 0.6988

Std 0.1051 0.0467 0.2937 0.1821
RCAC Mean 0.9459 0.0506 0.3280 0.8509
Std 0.0190 0.0181 0.0988 0.0470
RGB Mean 0.9162 0.0763 0.4541 0.7934
Std 0.0473 0.0436 0.2198 0.0637
Histogram Mean 0.9065 0.0834 0.4890 0.7724
Std 0.0544 0.0474 0.2360 0.0677
KDAC Mean 0.9501 0.0474 0.3101 0.8693
Std 0.0186 0.0208 0.1162 0.0387
 H. Li et al. / Information Sciences 450 (2018) 53–72 71

Fig. 19. Some segmentation results obtained by proposed KDAC.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, we proposed a novel interactive active contour model based on a kernel descriptor. We first extracted
image patch features, clustered the patches into several clusters, achieved the initial contour by using the user inputs, and
constructed the template feature sets corresponding to the clusters. We then utilized the template feature sets to formu-
late our energy functional, subject to a constraint on the total length of the region boundaries. In several experiments, we
compared the proposed method with other algorithms and other high-dimensional features (such as RGB patch feature and
histogram patch feature), the results of which show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our experimental results
demonstrate the strength of the proposed method in accurately segmenting heterogeneous and cluttered images.

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