Image segmentation is among the most studied problems in image understanding and

computer vision. The goal of image segmentation is to partition the image plane into

a set of meaningful regions. Here meaningful typically refers to a semantic partitioning

where the computed regions correspond to individual objects in the observed scene.

Unfortunately, generic purely low-level segmentation algorithms often do not provide the

desired segmentation results, because the traditional low level assumptions like intensity

or texture homogeneity and strong edge contrast are not sufficient to separate objects in a

scene.