Constrained Compound Markov Random Field Model with Graduated Penalty Function for Color Image Segmentation

Abstract

In this paper, an unsupervised color image segmentation scheme has been proposed for preserving strong and weak edges as well. A Constrained Compound Markov Random Field (MRF) has been proposed as the a priori model for the color labels. We have used Ohta (I1, I2, I3) color model and a controlled correlation of the color space has been accomplished by the proposed compound MRF model. The Constrained Compound MRF (CCMRF) is found to possess the unifying property of modeling scenes as well as color textures. In unsupervised scheme, the associated model parameters and the image labels are estimated recursively. The model parameters are the Maximum Conditional Pseudo Likelihood (MCPL) estimates and the labels are the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) estimates. The performance of the proposed scheme has been compared with that of Yu’s method and has been found to exhibit improved performance in the context of misclassification error.