Patent ID: 7519220

Claim:
A system for segmenting an object in an image, the object being identified by one or more selected pixels located within the object, comprising: a graphics processing unit; and software loaded on the graphics processing unit, the software being operated to: (a) create from the image a weighted graph with image pixels being graph nodes; (b) determine weights for all edges in the graph of neighboring pixels for the image; (c) build a Laplacian matrix L with the weights; (d) determine a vector d having values associated with a pixel equal to a sum of the weights of the neighbors of that pixel; (e) eliminate the row and column corresponding to the one or more selected pixels from the Laplacian matrix L and the vector d to determine L 0 and d 0 ; (f) solve x in the equation L 0 x=d 0 ; (g) threshold the potentials x to determine a family of segmentations and select one of the segmentations with a minimum isoperimetric ratio described by h G = min x ⁢ ( x T ⁢ Lx ) / x T ⁢ d as the object; and (h) segment the object from the image.