The Tractability of Segmentation and Scene Analysis

  • Authors:
  • Martin C. Cooper

  • Affiliations:
  • IRIT, University of Toulouse III, 31062 Toulouse, France

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

One of the fundamental problems in computer vision is thesegmentation of an image into semantically meaningful regions, basedonly on image characteristics. A single segmentation can bedetermined using a linear number of evaluations of a uniformitypredicate. However, minimising the number of regions is shown to bean NP-complete problem. We also show that the variational approach tosegmentation, based on minimising a criterion combining the overallvariance of regions and the number of regions, also gives rise to anNP-complete problem.When a library of object models is available, segmenting the imagebecomes a problem of scene analysis. A sufficient condition for thereconstruction of a 3D scene from a 2D image to be solvable inpolynomial time is that the scene contains no cycles of mutuallyoccluding objects and that no range information can be deduced fromthe image. It is known that relaxing the no cycles condition rendersthe problem NP-complete. We show that relaxing the no rangeinformation condition also produces an NP-complete problem.