The Tractability of Segmentation and Scene Analysis

摘要

One of the fundamental problems in computer vision is the segmentation of an image into semantically meaningful regions, based only on image characteristics. A single segmentation can be determined using a linear number of evaluations of a uniformity predicate. However, minimising the number of regions is shown to be an NP-complete problem. We also show that the variational approach to segmentation, based on minimising a criterion combining the overall variance of regions and the number of regions, also gives rise to an NP-complete problem.