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Directed Acyclic Graph Continuous Max-Flow Image Segmentation for Unconstrained Label Orderings

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Abstract

Label ordering, the specification of subset–superset relationships for segmentation labels, has been of increasing interest in image segmentation as they allow for complex regions to be represented as a collection of simple parts. Recent advances in continuous max-flow segmentation have widely expanded the possible label orderings from binary background/foreground problems to extendable frameworks in which the label ordering can be specified. This article presents Directed Acyclic Graph Max-Flow image segmentation which is flexible enough to incorporate any label ordering without constraints. This framework uses augmented Lagrangian multipliers and primal–dual optimization to develop a highly parallelized solver implemented using GPGPU. This framework is validated on synthetic, natural, and medical images illustrating its general applicability.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Zahra Hosseini, Maria Drangova, and Ravi Menon’s laboratory at the Robarts Research Institute Imaging Laboratories for their assistance in collecting and processing MRI phase data. John S.H. Baxter and A. Jonathan McLeod were funded through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robarts Research Institute, Western University, London, ON, Canada

    John S. H. Baxter, A. Jonathan McLeod & Terry M. Peters

  2. Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK

    Martin Rajchl

  3. School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xidian University, Xi’an, China

    Jing Yuan

Authors
  1. John S. H. Baxter
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  2. Martin Rajchl
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  3. A. Jonathan McLeod
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  4. Jing Yuan
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  5. Terry M. Peters
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Correspondence to John S. H. Baxter.

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Communicated by Julien Mairal.

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Baxter, J.S.H., Rajchl, M., McLeod, A.J. et al. Directed Acyclic Graph Continuous Max-Flow Image Segmentation for Unconstrained Label Orderings. Int J Comput Vis 123, 415–434 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-017-0994-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-017-0994-x

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