Proc. of Int. Conf.

on Emerging Trends in Engineering and Technology

Extraction of Foreground in images with Similar

Background using Grab Cut in HSV Color Space
Priyanka Panchhi1, Anurag Jain2, and Sumit Kaushik2
1,2
GIMT, Kurukshetra, India
Email: priyankapanchhi@gmail.com, anuragjain@gimtkkr.com, sumitkaushik24@gmail.com

Abstract—Interactive image segmentation of images has great practical importance. Grab

cut is an approach based on optimization by graph cut is implemented by Rother et. al.
Grab cut is faster technique and it only requires a rough initial trimap by user interaction.
But Grab Cut fails for the images having same foreground and background color Intensity
Here we proposed a variation of Grab cut by applying the Grab Cut on other Color model.
Detail of the approach is given in the paper.

Index Terms—Grab Cut, Graph Cut, HSV Space, Interactive Image Segmentation

I. INTRODUCTION
The paper addresses the interactive Grab cut algorithm used in computer vision of research for image
segmentation. Foreground image segmentation is the task of identifying an object from the background.
Many approaches are their based upon color information, edge information or region connectivity. The
problem of image segmentation has received a lot of attention since the early days of computer vision of
research [1]. The paper is organized as follows – in section I Introduction basic of Graph segmentation and
Grab cut algorithm and discussed. Proposed Method is given in Section II. Section III consists of results and
analysis. And finally the conclusion is given in section IV.
A. Graph Cut
Grab cut is an innovative and iterative image segmentation technique based upon the Graph Cut algorithm by
Boykov and Jolly 2001[2]. An Image can be represented by the graph G (V, E). The nodes correspond to
pixels. A graph also contains some additional special nodes called terminals. Terminals correspond to the set
of labels that can be assigned to pixels. The terminals are usually called the source and the sink. All edges in
the graph are assigned some weight or cost. There are two types of edges in the graph: N-links and T-links.
N-links connect pixels in the 8-neighborhood.These links describe the penalty for placing a segmentation
boundary between the neighboring pixels. T-links connect each pixel to the foreground and background
nodes.
These describe the probability that each pixel belongs to the foreground or to the background. A min cut C on
a graph with two terminals is a partitioning of the nodes in the graph into two disjoint subsets S and T such
that the source s is in S and the sink t is in T [3]. The minimum cut problem on a graph is to find a cut that
has the minimum cost among all cuts as to segment an image to foreground and background shown in the
figure 1. The minimum s/t cut problem can be solved by finding a maximum flow from the source s to the
sink t by using Ford –Flukerson Max Flow theorem [4]

DOI: 03.AETS.2013.3.121
© Association of Computer Electronics and Electrical Engineers, 2013
 Figure 1: Graph segmentation for foreground and background Extraction

B. Grab Cut
Grab cut is an innovative and iterative image segmentation technique developed by Rother et. al [ 6 ] based
upon Graph cut. The users only need to input the very rough segmentation between foreground and
background. Typically this is down by drawing a rectangle around the object of interest also called trimap [5]
as shown in figure 2.
Although grab cut is much faster method but delay due to graph cut step is noticeable as Graph Cut is time
consuming. Grab cut also fail for the images having same foreground and background intensity as shown in
figure 3.

. Figure 2: Example of Grab cut

As in figure 3(b) crown of radha Krishna is left out in the output segmentation image and also in figure 4(b)
the flower is not properly segmented.
In our implementation we try our algorithm for the images having same foreground and back ground
intensity by changing the image from RGB color model to HSV color model

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II. PROPOSED WORK
In our implementation of Grab cut we done the segmentation on HSV image rather than RGB image. The
main steps in implementation are:
1. Take the input image in RGB model.
2. Convert the RGB image to HSV image.
3. Apply Grab Cut algorithm on the HSV image as given by Rother et. al. till the resulted segmented
image.
4. Convert the resulted HSV image again to the RGB Image.
5. Compare the results with RGB Model

III. RESULT AND ANALYSIS

Results for the proposed work is shown in the figure 3 and figure 4. In our implementation we also compared
the time for both depending upon the no. of pixels in trimap. Result for the time for execution is given in
figure 5.

(a)

(b)

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 (c)
Figure 3 (a) Radha image (b) RGB model (c) HSV Model

(a)

(b)

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 (c)
Figure 4: (a) Flower Image (b) RGB Model (c) HSV Model

Figure 5: Time Comparison

As shown in above figure 3 and figure 4 by changing color model of Input images from RGB color Model to
HSV color Model before applying Grab Cut results are improved. It is shown that by changing the color
model of an input image Grab cut works fine for the images having same foreground and background
intensity. And also the time needed for conversion and segmentation also not to large if compared with
previous one as shown in figure 5.

IV. CONCLUSION
In our implementation it is seen that segmentation and quality of segmentation depends upon the information
selected in trimap. As because learning of GMM components depend upon the pixels in trimap for
foreground extraction. Grab cut can be improved if some approach can be applied regardless of information
selected for getting good segmentation results.
The work can be done to see what happen to border matting in HSV Space. If we can incorporate learning
which finds pixels with same background and foreground to deal with separately So that execution time can
be improved.

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REFERENCES
[1] Arora, C., Banerjee, S., Kalra, P. and Maheshwari, S.N. (2010),” An Efficient Graph Cut Algorithm for Computer
Vision Problems”, Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Vol. 6313, pp. 552-565.
[2] Boykov, Y., and Jolly, M.-P (2001),” Interactive graph cuts for optimal boundary and region segmentation of
objects in n-d images”, In Proc. of the International Conference on Computer Vision, vol. 1, pp.105–112.
[3] Boykov, Y. and Kolmogorov, V. (2004),”An Experimental Comparison of min-cut/max-flow algorithm for energy
optimization in vision,”IEEE transaction on PAMI, Vol. 26, No 9, pp 1124-1137.
[4] Brian L. Price, Bryan, Morse and Scott, Cohen (2010),” Geodesic Graph Cut for Interactive Image Segmentation”,
In Proceeding of CVPR, pp.3161-3168.
[5] Chen, D., Chen, B., Mamic, G., Fookes, C. and Sridharan, S. (2007),”Improved Grabcut Segmentation via GMM
Optimisation,”IEEE International Confrence,pp. 39-45.
[6] Rother, C., Kolmogorov, V. and Blake, A. (2004), “GrabCut: interactive foreground extraction using iterated graph
cuts,” ACM Trans SigGraph, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 309–314.

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