SLIC Superpixels
Abstract
Superpixels are becoming increasingly popular for use in computer vision applications. However, there are few algorithms that output a desired number of regular, compact superpixels with a low computational overhead. We introduce a novel algorithm called SLIC (Simple Linear Iterative Clustering) that clusters pixels in the combined five-dimensional color and image plane space to efficiently generate compact, nearly uniform superpixels. The simplicity of our approach makes it extremely easy to use - a lone parameter specifies the number of superpixels - and the efficiency of the algorithm makes it very practical. Experiments show that our approach produces superpixels at a lower computational cost while achieving a segmentation quality equal to or greater than four state-of-the-art methods, as measured by boundary recall and under-segmentation error. We also demonstrate the benefits of our superpixel approach in contrast to existing methods for two tasks in which superpixels have already been shown to increase performance over pixel-based methods.
Reference
Radhakrishna Achanta, Appu Shaji, Kevin Smith, Aurelien Lucchi, Pascal Fua, and Sabine Süsstrunk,SLIC Superpixels, EPFL Technical Report no. 149300, June 2010.
Download Windows executable (GUI)
Download Windows executable (Command line)
Windows command line based executable
Download 32 bits Linux executable
Download 64 bits Linux executable
The C++ source code for SLIC superpixels and supervoxels available here:
Visual Comparison with other algorithms
[GS04] Graph-based segmentation [NC05] Normalized cuts [TP09] Turbopixels [QS09] QuickShift SLIC
Other superpixel methods
[GS04] Felzenszwalb, P., Huttenlocher, D.: Efficient graph-based image segmentation. IJCV (2004).
[NC05] G. Mori, Guiding Model Search Using Segmentation. ICCV (2005).
[TP09] Levinshtein, A., Stere, A., Kutulakos, K., Fleet, D., Dickinson, S., Siddiqi, K.:Turbopixels: Fast superpixels using geometric flows. PAMI (2009)
[QS09] Vedaldi, A., Soatto, S.: Quick shift and kernel methods for mode seeking. ECCV (2008)
Work that uses SLIC superpixels
A. Lucchi, K. Smith, R. Achanta, V. Lepetit and P. Fua,
A Fully Automated Approach to Segmentation of Irregularly Shaped Cellular Structures in EM Images, International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), Beijing, China, 2010.
SLIC Superpixels
Abstract
Superpixels are becoming increasingly popular for use in computer vision applications. However, there are few algorithms that output a desired number of regular, compact superpixels with a low computational overhead. We introduce a novel algorithm called SLIC (Simple Linear Iterative Clustering) that clusters pixels in the combined five-dimensional color and image plane space to efficiently generate compact, nearly uniform superpixels. The simplicity of our approach makes it extremely easy to use - a lone parameter specifies the number of superpixels - and the efficiency of the algorithm makes it very practical. Experiments show that our approach produces superpixels at a lower computational cost while achieving a segmentation quality equal to or greater than four state-of-the-art methods, as measured by boundary recall and under-segmentation error. We also demonstrate the benefits of our superpixel approach in contrast to existing methods for two tasks in which superpixels have already been shown to increase performance over pixel-based methods.
Reference
Radhakrishna Achanta, Appu Shaji, Kevin Smith, Aurelien Lucchi, Pascal Fua, and Sabine Süsstrunk,SLIC Superpixels, EPFL Technical Report no. 149300, June 2010.
Download Windows executable (GUI)
Download Windows executable (Command line)
Windows command line based executable
Download 32 bits Linux executable
Download 64 bits Linux executable
The C++ source code for SLIC superpixels and supervoxels available here:
Visual Comparison with other algorithms
[GS04] Graph-based segmentation | [NC05] Normalized cuts | [TP09] Turbopixels | [QS09] QuickShift | SLIC |
Other superpixel methods
[GS04] Felzenszwalb, P., Huttenlocher, D.: Efficient graph-based image segmentation. IJCV (2004).[NC05] G. Mori, Guiding Model Search Using Segmentation. ICCV (2005).
[TP09] Levinshtein, A., Stere, A., Kutulakos, K., Fleet, D., Dickinson, S., Siddiqi, K.:Turbopixels: Fast superpixels using geometric flows. PAMI (2009)
[QS09] Vedaldi, A., Soatto, S.: Quick shift and kernel methods for mode seeking. ECCV (2008)