Topographic Description Of Grey-Tone Images: Some Applications To Segmentation And Tracking.
Jean-Pierre Gambotto · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1988
A grey-tone image can be viewed as a three-dimensional continuous surface with peaks, ridges, valleys, plains and oriented facets. In this paper, simple methods are described to analyze the structure of this three-dimensional surface. A small number of classes are defined to represent the structure of the image, and an algorithm is used to classify each pixel according to its local grey-tone structure. Then, region growing procedures are given to segment the image into semantically meaningful regions. The problem of establishing a relationship between a topographic class and the physical properties of the image is also addressed and an algorithm is proposed to extract image patches which correspond to three-dimensional continuous surfaces in the scene. Applications of these algorithms to several images are presented and discussed.