title: Combined morphological-spectral unsupervised image segmentation.
abstract: The goal of segmentation is to partition an image into disjoint regions, in a manner consistent with human perception of the content. For unsupervised segmentation of general images, however, there is the competing requirement not to make prior assumptions about the scene. Here, a two-stage method for general image segmentation is proposed, which is capable of processing both textured and nontextured objects in a meaningful fashion. The first stage extracts texture features from the subbands of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform. Oriented median filtering is employed, to circumvent the problem of texture feature response at step edges in the image. From the processed feature images, a perceptual gradient function is synthesised, whose watershed transform provides an initial segmentation. The second stage of the algorithm groups together these primitive regions into meaningful objects. To achieve this, a novel spectral clustering technique is proposed, which introduces the weighted mean cut cost function for graph partitioning. The ability of the proposed algorithm to generalize across a variety of image types is demonstrated.
authors.affiliation: Visual Information Laboratory, Mitsubishi Electric ITE, Guildford, GU2 7YD, UK. rob.ocallaghan@vil.ite.mee.com
authors.forename: Robert J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: O'Callaghan
authors.forename: David R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Bull
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003196:Computer Graphics; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D009716:Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013382:Subtraction Technique