Efficient Image-Warping Framework for Content-Adaptive Superpixels Generation

We address the problem of efficient content-adaptive superpixel segmentation. Instead of adapting the size and/or amount of superpixels to the image content, we propose a warpingtransform that makes the image content more suitable to be segmented into regular superpixels. Regular superpixels in the warped image induce content-adaptive superpixels in the original image with improved segmentation accuracy. To efficiently compute the warping transform, we develop an iterative coarse-to-fine optimization procedure and employ a parallelization strategy allowing for a speedy GPU-based implementation. This solution works as a simple ‘add-on’ framework over an underlying segmentation algorithm and requires no additional parameters. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our approach provides competitive quality results and achieves a better time-accuracy trade-off. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with an application to disparity estimation.