*Article* **Content-Aware SLIC Super-Pixels for Semi-Dark Images (SLIC++)**

**Manzoor Ahmed Hashmani 1, Mehak Maqbool Memon 1,\*, Kamran Raza 2, Syed Hasan Adil 2, Syed Sajjad Rizvi 3 and Muhammad Umair 1**


**\*** Correspondence: mehak\_19001057@utp.edu.my

**Abstract:** Super-pixels represent perceptually similar visual feature vectors of the image. Super-pixels are the meaningful group of pixels of the image, bunched together based on the color and proximity of singular pixel. Computation of super-pixels is highly affected in terms of accuracy if the image has high pixel intensities, i.e., a semi-dark image is observed. For computation of super-pixels, a widely used method is SLIC (Simple Linear Iterative Clustering), due to its simplistic approach. The SLIC is considerably faster than other state-of-the-art methods. However, it lacks in functionality to retain the content-aware information of the image due to constrained underlying clustering technique. Moreover, the efficiency of SLIC on semi-dark images is lower than bright images. We extend the functionality of SLIC to several computational distance measures to identify potential substitutes resulting in regular and accurate image segments. We propose a novel SLIC extension, namely, SLIC++ based on hybrid distance measure to retain content-aware information (lacking in SLIC). This makes SLIC++ more efficient than SLIC. The proposed SLIC++ does not only hold efficiency for normal images but also for semi-dark images. The hybrid content-aware distance measure effectively integrates the Euclidean super-pixel calculation features with Geodesic distance calculations to retain the angular movements of the components present in the visual image exclusively targeting semidark images. The proposed method is quantitively and qualitatively analyzed using the Berkeley dataset. We not only visually illustrate the benchmarking results, but also report on the associated accuracies against the ground-truth image segments in terms of boundary precision. SLIC++ attains high accuracy and creates content-aware super-pixels even if the images are semi-dark in nature. Our findings show that SLIC++ achieves precision of 39.7%, outperforming the precision of SLIC by a substantial margin of up to 8.1%.

**Keywords:** clustering; similarity measure; geodesic measure; Euclidean measure
