Noise-Robust SLIC Superpixel for Natural Images

Superpixel algorithm aims to semantically group neighboring pixels into a coherent region. It could significantly boost the performance of the subsequent vision processing task such as image segmentation. Recently, the work simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) [1] has drawn huge attention for its state-of-the-art segmentation performance and high computational efficiency. However, the performance of SLIC is dramatically degraded for noisy images. In this work, we propose three measures to improve the robustness of SLIC against noise: 1) a new pixel intensity distance measurement is designed by explicitly considering the within-cluster noise variance; 2) the spatial distance measurement is refined by exploiting the variation of pixel locations in a cluster; and 3) a noise-robust estimator is proposed to update the cluster centers by excluding the possible outliers caused by noise. Extensive experimental results on synthetic noisy images validate the effectiveness of those improvements. In addition, we apply the proposed noise-robust SLIC to superpixel-based noise level estimation task to demonstrate its practical usage.