Patent ID: 8655069

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, by a computer, at least one user input identifying a plurality of image elements in a segmented image as belonging to a first portion of the image, the segmented image comprising the first portion comprising image elements having a first label and a second portion comprising image elements having a second label; updating properties associated with the first portion of the image giving more weight to the identified plurality of image elements than to other image elements in the first portion; and updating the first and second portions of the segmented image based on the updated properties; wherein, the properties associated with the first portion of the image comprise a Gaussian mixture model and updating properties associated with the first portion of the image giving more weight to the identified plurality of image elements than to other image elements in the first portion comprises: updating parameters of the Gaussian mixture model using a weighted average of a Gaussian mixture model component for each image element in the plurality of image elements and for each of the other image elements in the first portion, wherein a first weight is applied to the component for each image element in the plurality of image elements, a second weight is applied to the component for each of the other image elements in the first portion and the first weight is larger than the second weight; or the method further comprises: computing a plurality of regions in the image, each region comprising connected image elements having the second label before updating the first and second portions and having the first label after updating the first and second portions; and further updating the first and second portions of the segmented image by determining if a region comprises one of the plurality of identified image elements and if the region does not comprise one of the plurality of identified image elements, changing the label of each image element in the region from the first label to the second label.