Fast watershed aided by target detection
Huibao Lin, Jennie Si, Glen P. Abousleman · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2002
The Watershed algorithm has been studied extensively, and has been applied to image segmentation due to its accuracy and robustness. However, the watershed requires a large amount of memory, and is computationally intractable for segmenting large images. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical region-of-interest (ROI) detection scheme, which is used as a prelude to segmentation. With the help of the detection algorithm, watershed segmentation can be applied to the small detected regions, rather than to the entire image. Therefore, it can process large images by selectively segmenting ROIs. We focus on our new ROI detection algorithm, and how it is integrated into a system for large-image segmentation. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme by processing a variety of images.