A NOVEL PREDICATE FOR ACTIVE REGION MERGING IN AUTOMATIC IMAGE SEGMENTATION

Abstract

Image segmentation is an elementary task in computer vision and image processing. This paper deals with the automatic image segmentation in a region merging method. Two essential problems in a region merging algorithm: order of merging and the stopping criterion. These two problems are solved by a novel predicate which is described by the sequential probability ratio test and the minimal cost criterion. In this paper we propose an Active Region merging algorithm which utilizes the information acquired from perceiving edges in color images in L*a*b* color space. By means of color gradient recognition method, pixels with no edges are clustered and considered alone to recognize some preliminary portion of the input image. The color information along with a region growth map consisting of completely grown regions are used to perform an Active region merging method to combine regions with similar characteristics. Experiments on real natural images are performed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed Active region merging method. Index Terms: Adaptive threshold generation, CIE L*a*b* color gradient, region merging, Sequential Probability Ratio