High Quality - Low Computational Cost Technique for Automated Principal Object Segmentation Applied in Solar and Medical Imaging

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to introduce a fully computerized, simple and low-computational cost technique that can be used in the preprocessing stages of digital images. This technique is specially designed to detect the principal (largest) closed shape object that embody the useful information in certain image types and neglect and avoid other noisy objects and artifacts. The detection process starts by calculating certain statistics of the image to estimate the amount of bit-plane slicing required to exclude the non-informative and noisy background. A simple closing morphological operation is then applied and followed by circular filter applied only on the outer coarse edge to finalize the detection process. The proposed technique takes its importance from the huge explosion of images that need accurate processing in real time speedy manner. The proposed technique is implemented using MATLAB and tested on many solar and medical images; it was shown by the quantitative evaluation that the proposed technique can handle real-life (e.g. solar, medical fundus) images and shows very good potential even under noisy and artifacts conditions. Compared to the publicly available datasets, 97% and 99% of similarity detection is achieved in medical and solar images, respectively. Although it is well-know, the morphological bit-plane slicing technique is hoped to be used in the preprocessing stages of different applications to ease the subsequent image processing stages especially in real time applications where the proposed technique showed dramatic (~100 times) saving in processing time.