Context-free Marker Controlled Watershed Transform for Efficient Multi-object Detection and Segmentation
Gyeong-Seok Seo, Sang-Hyeon Jo, Heung-Mun Choe, Chang-Jun Park · Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea · 2001
A high speed context-free marker-controlled and minima imposition-free watershed transform is proposed for efficient multi-object detection and segmentation from a complex background. The context-free markers are extracted from a complex backgrounded multi-object image using a noise tolerant attention operator. These make marker-controlled watershed possible for the over-segmentation reduction without region merging. The proposed method presents a marker-constrained labeling that can speed up the segmentation of a marker-controlled watershed transform by eliminating the necessity of the minima imposition. Simulation results show that the proposed method can efficiently detects and segments multiple objects from a complex background while reducing over- segmentation and the computation time.