USING GRAPH CUTS FOR EDITING PHOTOGRAPHS

An image editing system comprises an input device for inputting an image, a graphical user interface for selecting background and object seeds for the image, and an image processor for editing the image. The image processor has various editing routines, including a segmentation routine that builds a graph associated with the image and uses a graph cut algorithm to cut the graph into segments. The user marks certain pixels as “object” or “background” to provide hard constraints for segmentation. Additional soft constraints incorporate both boundary and regional information. Graph cuts are used to find the globally optimal segementation of the image. The obtained solution gives the best balance of boundary and region properties satisfying the constraints.