Flexible Live-Wire: Image Segmentation with Floating Anchors

Abstract

We introduce Flexible Live-Wire, a generalization of the Live-Wire interactive segmentation technique with floating anchors. In our approach, the user input for Live-Wire is no longer limited to the setting of pixel-level anchor nodes, but can use more general anchor sets. These sets can be of any dimension, size, or connectedness. The generality of the approach allows the design of a number of user interactions while providing the same functionality as the traditional Live-Wire. In particular, we experiment with this new flexibility by designing four novel Live-Wire interactions based on specific primitives: paint, pinch, probable, and pick anchors. These interactions are only a subset of the possibilities enabled by our generalization. Moreover, we discuss the computational aspects of this approach and provide practical solutions to alleviate any additional overhead. Finally, we illustrate our approach and new interactions through several example segmentations.