An Efficient Morphological Segmentation Using a Connected Operator Based on Size and Contrast
Tae‐Hyeon Kim, Young Shik Moon · Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea · 2005
In this paper, we propose an efficient segmentation algerian using morphological grayscale reconstruction for region-based coding. Each segmentation stage consists of simplification, marker extraction and decision. The simplification removes unnecessary components to make an easier segmentation. The marker extraction finds the flat zones which are the seed points from the simplified image. The decision is to locate the contours of regions detected by the marker extraction. For the simplification, we use a new connected operator based on the size and contrast. In the marker extraction stage, the regions reconstructed to original values we excluded from the candidate marker. For the other regions, the regions which are larger than structuring elements or have higher contrast than a threshold value are selected as markers. For the initial segmentation, the conventional hierarchical watershed algorithm and the extracted markers are used. Finally in the region merging stage, we propose an efficient region merging algorithm which preserves a high quality in terms of the number of regions. At the same time, the pairs which have higher contrast than a threshold are excluded from the region merging stage. Experimental results show that the proposed marker extraction method produces a small number of markers, while maintaining high quality and that the proposed region merging algorithm achieves a good performance in terms of the image quality and the number of regions.