Interactive image segmentation by precomputation

1. A non-transitory computer readable medium embodying instructions executable by a processor to perform a method for interactive image segmentation, the method comprising:

receiving an image;

determining a plurality of generalized eigenvectors of the image without using seed points;

receiving a seed point for each of at least two portions of the image; and

determining a partition of the image, the determination of the partition comprising:

establishing a potential function assigning a label to each of a plurality of nodes of the image according to distances between the nodes and the seed points in a space defined by the generalized eigenvectors, wherein each of the labels correspond to one of the portions of the image; and

thresholding the potential function to produce the partition of the image.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the partition of the image corresponds to an object captured by the image.

3. A non-transitory computer readable medium embodying instructions executable by a processor to perform a method for interactive image segmentation, the method comprising:

receiving an image to be segmented;

performing an offline computation of eigenvectors of a Laplacian of the image without using seed points;

receiving seed points; and

performing an online segmentation taking the seed points and the eigenvectors of the Laplacian as input and outputting a partition of the image,

wherein performing the online segmentation comprises:

determining a Normalized Cuts value based on the seed points and the eigenvectors of the Laplacian; and

partitioning the image according to the Normalized Cuts value.

4. The method of claim 3 , wherein performing the offline segmentation further comprises:

determining edge weights of the image;

building a normalized Laplacian; and

determining the eigenvectors of the normalized Laplacian.

5. The method of claim 3 , wherein a number of the eigenvectors computed is user selected.