01-03-2013, 01:06 PM
A REGION-REGION AND REGION-EDGE COOPERATIVE APPROACH OF IMAGE SEGMENTATION
ABSTRACT
We introduce here a new approach of image segmentation, which tends to combine several sources of knowledge bout the image in a way to produce better segmentation results. First, we try to locate germs that are homogenous by means of a region-region cooperative process. A region growing process is then applied to these germs in order to find the region borders. This process is controlled, on the one hand, by the germs parameters, and on the other hand by a gradient information obtained by a simple edge detector. Finally, a region merging step is applied on the extracted regions in order to reconstruct regions that have been split by the germs extraction process. This method has given good segmentation results over several complex natural images.