Abstract
Segmentation of noisy or textured images remains challenging in both accuracy and computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new approach for segmentation of noisy or textured images that exist widely in real life. The proposed approach finds the mean values of different pixel classes more efficiently and accurately than the benchmark expectation maximization (EM) and K-means methods. With these mean values, the segmentation is achieved by clustering the pixels to its nearest mean. When too much noise is left for the presegmentation result or when textured objects are involved, we propose transforming the density distribution of labeled pixels into grayscale distribution by down-sampling the image with a bicubic function. An optimal threshold is automatically selected from the slope difference distribution of the histogram for the final segmentation. The extracted boundary is then refined by an energy minimization function with the detected edges when enough clear edges can be obtained. A large...
Highlights
Image segmentation plays an important role in computer vision problems
The stochastic modeling methods assume that the image is a Markov random field (MRF) which complies with Gibbs distribution [3], [4]
With the known number of pixel classes as 3, the computed mean values merge automatically based on their relative distances as 48, 105, and 153, which are more accurate than those parameters estimated by expectation maximization (EM)
Summary
Image segmentation plays an important role in computer vision problems. Due to the variety and complexity of the images captured in the real world, robust segmentation of the objects from the background remains a bottleneck for many types of images, e.g., segmentation of the remote sensing images that are usually characterized as noisy or textured. The stochastic modeling methods assume that the image is a Markov random field (MRF) which complies with Gibbs distribution [3], [4]. The Gibbs distribution characterizes the interaction of the neighboring pixels. It belongs to the local property of the image. Its effectiveness in estimating the Gibbs parameter is limited only to some specific textured images. In contrast to the local property, stochastic modeling methods assume different pixel classes complying with the Gaussian distribution [7], [8], which is the global property of the image. The expectation maximization (EM) algorithm [2], [9] is used to estimate the means and variances of different pixel c 2016 SIAM.
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