Parallel watershed transformation algorithms for image segmentation

Abstract

The watershed transformation is a mid-level operation used in morphological image segmentation. Techniques applied on large images, which must often complete fast, are usually computationally expensive and complex entailing efficient parallel algorithms. Two distributed approaches of the watershed transformation are introduced in this paper. The algorithms survey in a Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) model both local and global connectivity properties of the morphological gradient of a gray-scale image to label connected components. The sequentiality of the serial algorithm is broken in the parallel versions by exploiting the ordering relation between two neighboring pixels successively incorporated in the same region. Thus, a path is traced, for every unlabeled pixel, down to its region of inclusion (whose label is then propagated backwards); in the second algorithm, regions grow independently around their seeds. In both cases only pixels which satisfy the ordering relation are incorporated in any region. This way, not only different regions are explored in a parallel fashion, but also different parts of the same region, when the latter extends to neighboring subdomains, are treated likewise. Running time and relative speedup evaluated on a Cray T3D parallel computer are used to appreciate the performance of both algorithms.