@techreport{TR-IC-05-31, number = {IC-05-31}, author = {A.X. Falcão and P.A.V. Miranda and A. Rocha}, title = {A linear-time approach for graph-cut object detection}, month = {December}, year = {2005}, institution = {Institute of Computing, University of Campinas}, note = {In English, 11 pages. \par\selectlanguage{english}\textbf{Abstract} Image segmentation using graph cuts have become very popular in the last years. These methods are usually computationally expensive, even with hard constraints (seed pixels). We present a solution that requires only internal seeds and runs in time proportional to the number of pixels. Our method computes an ordered region growing where the propagation order of each pixel is proportional to the cost of an optimum path from the seed set to that pixel. Each pixel defines a region which includes it and all pixels with lower propagation order. The boundary of each region is a possible cut boundary, whose cut measure is also computed and assigned to the corresponding pixel on-the-fly. The object is obtained by selecting the pixel with minimum-cut measure and all pixels within its respective cut boundary. The method works with various cut measures and is evaluated using several experiments. } }