  Image segmentation refers to the process to divide an image into
nonoverlapping meaningful regions according to human perception, which has
become a classic topic since the early ages of computer vision. A lot of
research has been conducted and has resulted in many applications. However,
while many segmentation algorithms exist, yet there are only a few sparse and
outdated summarizations available, an overview of the recent achievements and
issues is lacking. We aim to provide a comprehensive review of the recent
progress in this field. Covering 180 publications, we give an overview of broad
areas of segmentation topics including not only the classic bottom-up
approaches, but also the recent development in superpixel, interactive methods,
object proposals, semantic image parsing and image cosegmentation. In addition,
we also review the existing influential datasets and evaluation metrics.
Finally, we suggest some design flavors and research directions for future
research in image segmentation.
