SEMANTIC OBJECT SELECTION

Techniques are disclosed herein that enable digital images to be segmented based on a user's semantic input. In other words, given an input image of a person walking a dog adjacent to a tree, a user can simply provide the semantic input “dog” and the system will segment the dog from the other elements in the image. If the user provides other semantic input, such as “person” or “tree”, the system will segment the person or the tree, respectively, from the same image. Using semantic input advantageously eliminates any need for a user to directly interact with the input image through a tedious process of painting brush strokes, tracing boundaries, clicking target points, and/or drawing bounding boxes. Thus semantic input represents an easier and more intuitive way for users to interact with an image segmentation interface, thereby enabling novice users to take advantage of advanced image segmentation techniques.