VCells: simple and efficient superpixels using Edge-Weighted Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations

VCells, the proposed Edge-Weighted Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations (EWCVTs)-based algorithm, is used to generate superpixels, i.e., an oversegmentation of an image. For a wide range of images, the new algorithm is capable of generating roughly uniform subregions and nicely preserving local image boundaries. The undersegmentation error is effectively limited in a controllable manner. Moreover, VCells is very efficient with core computational cost at O(K√n(c)·N) in which K, n(c), and N are the number of iterations, superpixels, and pixels, respectively. Extensive qualitative discussions are provided, together with the high-quality segmentation results of VCells on a wide range of complex images. The simplicity and efficiency of our model are demonstrated by complexity analysis, time, and accuracy evaluations.