Extraction of a Central Object in a Color Image Based on Significant Colors
Sungyoung Kim, Eun‐Kyung Lim, MinHwan Kim · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2004
A method of extracting central objects in color images without any prior-knowledge is proposed in this paper, which uses basically information of significant color distribution. A central object in an image is defined as a set of regions that lie around center of the image and have significant color distribution against the other surround (or background) regions. Significant colors in an image are first defined as the colors that are distributed more densely around center of the image than near borders. Then core object regions (CORs) are selected as the regions a lot of pixels of which have the significant colors. Finally, the adjacent regions to the CORs are iteratively merged if they are similar to the CORs but not to the background regions in color distribution. The merging result is accepted as the central object that may include differently color-characterized regions and/or two or more objects of interest. Usefulness of the significant colors in extracting the central object was verified through experiments on several kinds of test images. We expect that central objects shall be used usefully in image retrieval applications.