“Lazy snapping” by Li, Sun, Tang and Shum

In this paper, we present Lazy Snapping, an interactive image cutout tool. Lazy Snapping separates coarse and fine scale processing, making object specification and detailed adjustment easy. Moreover, Lazy Snapping provides instant visual feedback, snapping the cutout contour to the true object boundary efficiently despite the presence of ambiguous or low contrast edges. Instant feedback is made possible by a novel image segmentation algorithm which combines graph cut with pre-computed over-segmentation. A set of intuitive user interface (UI) tools is designed and implemented to provide flexible control and editing for the users. Usability studies indicate that Lazy Snapping provides a better user experience and produces better segmentation results than the state-of-the-art interactive image cutout tool, Magnetic Lasso in Adobe Photoshop.

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