  Interactive object selection is a very important research problem and has
many applications. Previous algorithms require substantial user interactions to
estimate the foreground and background distributions. In this paper, we present
a novel deep learning based algorithm which has a much better understanding of
objectness and thus can reduce user interactions to just a few clicks. Our
algorithm transforms user provided positive and negative clicks into two
Euclidean distance maps which are then concatenated with the RGB channels of
images to compose (image, user interactions) pairs. We generate many of such
pairs by combining several random sampling strategies to model user click
patterns and use them to fine tune deep Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs).
Finally the output probability maps of our FCN 8s model is integrated with
graph cut optimization to refine the boundary segments. Our model is trained on
the PASCAL segmentation dataset and evaluated on other datasets with different
object classes. Experimental results on both seen and unseen objects clearly
demonstrate that our algorithm has a good generalization ability and is
superior to all existing interactive object selection approaches.
