Wavelet filtering for the segmentation of marble images
Felipe Lumbreras · Optical Engineering · 1996
Microscope images of thin marble sections can be used to determine their geographical origin by means of the shape, size and spatial distribution of their grains. In this article, we present a method that is the first step towards the automatic origin determination, namely, the segmentation of grains in digital images of thin marble sections. Each grain has a preferred direction, different from the one of its neighbours, which rules its behaviour when it is illuminated with polarized light. Firstly, we perform an oversegmentation of the image with a filter based on a partial wavelet reconstruction followed by a watershed transformation. Afterwards, from a sequence of images of the same sample obtained by means of polarized light we compute, for each region, two parameters which depend on the preferred direction of the grain it belongs to. Finally, the set of parameter values for all the regions is the input to a region merging procedure which achieves the final segmentation. We present...