A Biologically-Inspired Framework for Contour Detection Using Superpixel-Based Candidates and Hierarchical Visual Cues

Contour detection has been extensively investigated as a fundamental problem in computer vision. In this study, a biologically-inspired candidate weighting framework is proposed for the challenging task of detecting meaningful contours. In contrast to previous models that detect contours from pixels, a modified superpixel generation processing is proposed to generate a contour candidate set and then weigh the candidates by extracting hierarchical visual cues. We extract the low-level visual local cues to weigh the contour intrinsic property and mid-level visual cues on the basis of Gestalt principles for weighting the contour grouping constraint. Experimental results tested on the BSDS benchmark show that the proposed framework exhibits promising performances to capture meaningful contours in complex scenes.