• International Journal of Contents
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1-10
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a method to build an accurate initial trimap for the GrabCut algorithm without the need for human interaction. First, we identify a rough candidate for the label region of a bottle by applying a saliency map to find a salient area from the image. Then, the Hough Transformation method is used to detect the left and right borders of the label region, and the k-means algorithm is used to localize the upper and lower borders of the label of the bottle. These four borders are used to build an initial trimap for the GrabCut method. Finally, GrabCut segments accurate regions for the label. The experimental results for 130 wine bottle images demonstrated that the saliency map extracted a rough label region with an accuracy of 97.69% while also removing the complex background. The Hough transform and projection method accurately drew the outline of the label from the saliency area, and then the outline was used to build an initial trimap for GrabCut. Finally, the GrabCut algorithm successfully segmented the bottle label with an average accuracy of 92.31%. Therefore, we believe that our method is suitable for product label recognition systems that automatically segment product labels. Although our method achieved encouraging results, it has some limitations in that unreliable results are produced under conditions with varying illumination and reflections. Therefore, we are in the process of developing preprocessing algorithms to improve the proposed method to take into account variations in illumination and reflections.