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foreground and background

The pixels belonging to the object of interest (foreground) versus everything else (background).

In binary segmentation, foreground and background are the two classes every pixel is sorted into: foreground is the object or region the task cares about, background is everything else. A single global threshold (Section 05) can only ever produce this two-class split; real scenes with many object types need a segmentation method (Chapter 14) that assigns more than two labels.

Examples

  • Thresholding a scanned document at brightness 128 calls every darker pixel foreground (ink) and every lighter pixel background (page).

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