Image segmentation and extraction based on pixel communities
Thanh-Khoa Nguyen · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2019
Image segmentation has become an indispensable task that is widely employed in several image processing applications including object detection, object tracking, automatic driver assistance, and traffic control systems, etc. The literature abounds with algorithms for achieving image segmentation tasks. These methods can be divided into some main groups according to the underlying approaches, such as Region-based image segmentation, Feature-based clustering, Graph-based approaches and Artificial Neural Network-based image segmentation. Recently, complex networks have mushroomed both theories and applications as a trend of developments. Hence, image segmentation techniques based on community detection algorithms have been proposed and have become an interesting discipline in the literature. In this thesis, we propose a novel framework for community detection based image segmentation. The idea that brings social networks analysis domain into image segmentation quite satisfies with most authors and harmony in those researches. However, how community detection algorithms can be applied in image segmentation efficiently is a topic that has challenged researchers for decades. The contribution of this thesis is an effort to construct best complex networks for applying community detection and proposal novel agglomerate methods in order to aggregate homogeneous regions producing good image segmentation results. Besides, we also propose a content based image retrieval system using the same features than the ones obtained by the image segmentation processes. The proposed image search engine for real images can implement to search the closest similarity images with query image. This content based image retrieval relies on the incorporation of our extracted features into Bag-of-Visual-Words model. This is one of representative applications denoted that image segmentation benefits several image processing and computer visions applications. Our methods have been tested on several data sets and evaluated by many well-known segmentation evaluation metrics. The proposed methods produce efficient image segmentation results compared to the state of the art.