A Coarse to Fine Image Segmentation Method

Shanjun ZHANG  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E80-D   No.7   pp.726-732
Publication Date: 1997/07/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Image Processing,Computer Graphics and Pattern Recognition
Keyword: 
image segmentation,  region growing,  homogeneity,  hypothesis test,  nested neighborhood system,  

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Summary: 
The segmentation of images into regions that have some common properties is a fundamental problem in low level computer vision. In this paper, the region growing method to segmentation is studied. In the study, a coarse to fine processing strategy is adopted to identify the homogeneity of the subregion of an image. The pixels in the image are checked by a nested triple-layer neighborhood system based hypothesis test. The pixels can then be classified into single pixels or grain pixels with different size and coarseness. Instead of using the global threshold to the region growing, local thresholds are determined adaptively for each pixel in the image. The strength of the proposed method lies in the fact that the thresholds are computed automatically. Experiments for synthetic and natural images show the efficiency of our method.