Recent advances in interactive segmentation (IS) allow speeding up and simplifying image editing and labeling greatly. The majority of modern IS approaches accept user input in the form of clicks. However, using clicks may require too many user interactions, especially when selecting small objects, minor parts of an object, or a group of objects of the same type. In this paper, we consider such a natural form of user interaction as a loose contour, and introduce a contour-based IS method. We evaluate the proposed method on the standard segmentation benchmarks, our novel UserContours dataset, and its subset UserContours-G containing difficult segmentation cases. Through experiments, we demonstrate that a single contour provides the same accuracy as multiple clicks, thus reducing the required amount of user interactions.

翻译：交互式分割（IS）的最新进展极大地加快了图像编辑与标注的速度并简化了流程。现有大多数IS方法接受用户以点击形式输入的交互。然而，使用点击方式可能需要过多的用户交互，尤其是当需要选择小物体、物体的细小部分或同类型物体群组时。本文考虑将松散轮廓作为用户交互的自然形式，并提出一种基于轮廓的IS方法。我们在标准分割基准数据集、新提出的UserContours数据集及其包含困难分割案例的子集UserContours-G上对所提方法进行了评估。实验证明，单条轮廓即可达到与多次点击相同的精度，从而减少了所需的用户交互量。