Flexible Live-Wire: Image Segmentation with Floating Anchors

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Our novel generalization via floating anchors enables the flexible design of input and interactions for Live-Wire image segmentation. (a) The flower can be segmented with region painting, line drawing using a pinch interaction, a probability field about a user’s click, or by picking from a set of alternate segmentations. (b) Traditional Live-Wire allows for only pixel-level anchor nodes which may be too precise for a user. A slight miss (left, top) in setting an anchor node causes an erroneous segmentation (red). Our approach allows for user controlled precision through anchor sets. A paint anchor at the same location (right, bottom) produces the correct segmentation (blue). Both anchors are valid inputs in our generalization.
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. 
	
@article {10.1111:cgf.13364,
          title = {{Flexible Live-Wire: Image Segmentation with Floating Anchors}},
          author = {Summa, Brian and Faraj, Noura and Licorish, Cody and Pascucci, Valerio},
          journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
          issue_date = {April 2018},
          volume = {37},
          number = {2},
          month = apr,
          year = {2018},
          pages = {321--328},
          publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
          DOI = {10.1111/cgf.13364}
          }