Image Segmentation Survey: Classical and Deep Learning Methods

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Image segmentation is a prerequisite to almost all computer vision applications. It enables the extraction of meaningful information from visual inputs by partitioning images into segments with shared features. This review paper begins by outlining different image segmentation tasks. It then surveys a broad spectrum of segmentation techniques, ranging from classical frameworks to deep-learning (DL) architectures. We perform this through a systematic literature analysis across a handful of applications as part of our methodology. A key contribution of our survey is that it elaborates on a few situations where classical approaches outperform DL-based methods in accuracy, along with the added advantage of computational efficiency. In some cases, these findings also provoke interest in revisiting classical methods, prompting strategies that leverage the strengths of both paradigms.