  Recent advances in interactive segmentation (IS) allow speeding up and
simplifying image editing and labeling greatly. The majority of modern IS
approaches accept user input in the form of clicks. However, using clicks may
require too many user interactions, especially when selecting small objects,
minor parts of an object, or a group of objects of the same type. In this
paper, we consider such a natural form of user interaction as a loose contour,
and introduce a contour-based IS method. We evaluate the proposed method on the
standard segmentation benchmarks, our novel UserContours dataset, and its
subset UserContours-G containing difficult segmentation cases. Through
experiments, we demonstrate that a single contour provides the same accuracy as
multiple clicks, thus reducing the required amount of user interactions.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition