System and Method for Image Segmentation by Optimizing Weighted Curvature

A method for segmenting an object in a digital image includes computing, for each point vi in the image, weights wijk of a curvature clique vjvivk for each successive pair of edges eij, eik incident on point vi, decomposing each curvature clique into pairwise edge weights to form a new set of edges by adding, for all points vj, vk, an edge eij with weight wij, an edge eik with weight wik, and an edge ejk with weight wjk, where weight wij equals weight wik equals ½ wijk, and weight wjk equals −½ wijk, computing an indicator function of the points of the image indicative of whether each point belongs to an object of interest by minimizing a functional of the indicator function, and segmenting the object of interest from the image based on the value of the indicator function x at each image point.