Given an image (or an image-like feature map), selective search (also called Hierarchical Grouping) first segments tehthe image by the algorithm in Felzenszwalb and Huttenlocher (2004),<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Felzenszwalb |first=Pedro F. |last2=Huttenlocher |first2=Daniel P. |date=2004-09-01 |title=Efficient Graph-Based Image Segmentation |url=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:VISI.0000022288.19776.77 |journal=International Journal of Computer Vision |language=en |volume=59 |issue=2 |pages=167–181 |doi=10.1023/B:VISI.0000022288.19776.77 |issn=1573-1405}}</ref> then performs the following:<ref name=":1" /><syntaxhighlight>Input: (colour) image
