Watershed segmentation: Switching back and forth between markers and hierarchies
Bruno Klava, Nina Sumiko, Tomita Hirata · Biblioteca Digital da Memória Científica do INPE (National Institute for Space Research) · 2007
The watershed transform [2] is a robust approach applied to digital image segmentation, once the watershed lines produced are very close to the object boundaries. However, there is a common problem of supersegmentation of the image. In order to avoid this situation, the watershed transform can be applied from a set of markers, in place of the local minima of the image. This approach, known as watershed from markers [2], reduces the segmentation problem to the problem of finding a proper set of markers for the objects and for the background of the image to be segmented. For this reason, the watershed from markers is a suitable approach for interaction: handling the set of markers interactively, the user can manage the segmentation process. In this manner, one is able to achieve the desired segmentation in a faster way, without needing to configure a lot of parameters or specifying formally a method to obtain an adequate set of markers in an automatic way. We first present an interactive tool for image segmentation [1] based on the watershed from markers. The user interaction focuses on the manual edition of the set of markers used by the algorithm. In the sequel, we describe interactivity in the context of the hierarchical watershed and current investigations that aim to merge both approaches in order to reduce the interaction effort.