Foreground and background image segmentation is described. In an example, a seed region is selected in a foreground portion of an image, and a geodesic distance is calculated from each image element to the seed region. A subset of the image elements having a geodesic distance less than a threshold is determined, and this subset of image elements are labeled as foreground. In another example, an image element from an image showing at least a user, a foreground object in proximity to the user, and a background is applied to trained decision trees to obtain probabilities of the image element representing one of these items, and a corresponding classification assigned to the image element. This is repeated for each image element. Image elements classified as belonging to the user are labeled as foreground, and image elements classified as foreground objects or background are labeled as background.