Image segmentation: A survey of graph-cut methods

As a preprocessing step, image segmentation, which can do partition of an image into different regions, plays an important role in computer vision, objects recognition, tracking and image analysis. Till today, there are a large number of methods present that can extract the required foreground from the background. However, most of these methods are solely based on boundary or regional information which has limited the segmentation result to a large extent. Since the graph cut based segmentation method was proposed, it has obtained a lot of attention because this method utilizes both boundary and regional information. Furthermore, graph cut based method is efficient and accepted world-wide since it can achieve globally optimal result for the energy function. It is not only promising to specific image with known information but also effective to the natural image without any pre-known information. For the segmentation of N-dimensional image, graph cut based methods are also applicable. Due to the advantages of graph cut, various methods have been proposed. In this paper, the main aim is to help researcher to easily understand the graph cut based segmentation approach. We also classify this method into three categories. They are speed up-based graph cut, interactive-based graph cut and shape prior-based graph cut. This paper will be helpful to those who want to apply graph cut method into their research.