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速并简化了图像编辑与标注过程。当前主流交互式分割方法大多以点击形式接收用户输入。然而，采用点击方式可能需要过多的用户交互，尤其在选取小目标、目标局部区域或同类型目标群组时表现尤为突出。本文研究了一种自然的用户交互形式——松散轮廓，并提出了一种基于轮廓的交互式分割方法。我们在标准分割基准、新构建的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。实验表明，单次轮廓输入即可达到多次点击输入相同的精度，从而有效减少了所需的用户交互量。