Automatic segmentation of color images with transitive closure

Abstract

In this paper, a mask based automatic segmentation algorithm for color images which uses pixel similarity has been presented. Main concept of the algorithm relies on spatial mask for course segmentation and the Warshall's transitive closure (TC) computation algorithm for region merging. Although the proposed spatial mask approach reduces the computational burden required for segmentation or clustering techniques such as seeded region growing (SRG) or fuzzy c-means (FCM) in which user supplied parameters are essential, it has over segmentation drawback. Therefore, the transitive closure algorithm, which uses adjacency and similarity matrix associated to undirected graph of the over segmented image, has been employed to merge the regions. After comparing to existing methods, the obtained experimental results confirmed that the color images as well as gray level images could be segmented with considerable accuracy. Also computational complexity of image segmentation is significantly reduced. Furthermore, there is no need any user supplied parameter such as the number of clusters or seed points.