Adaptive strategy for superpixel-based region-growing image segmentation

This work presents a region-growing image segmentation approach based on superpixel decomposition. From an initial contour-constrained over-segmentation of the input image, the image segmentation is achieved by iteratively merging similar superpixels into regions. This approach raises two key issues: (1) how to compute the similarity between superpixels in order to perform accurate merging and (2) in which order those superpixels must be merged together. In this perspective, we firstly introduce a robust adaptive multi-scale superpixel similarity in which region comparisons are made both at content and common border level. Secondly, we propose a global merging strategy to efficiently guide the region merging process. Such strategy uses an adpative merging criterion to ensure that best region aggregations are given highest priorities. This allows to reach a final segmentation into consistent regions with strong boundary adherence. We perform experiments on the BSDS500 image dataset to highlight to which extent our method compares favorably against other well-known image segmentation algorithms. The obtained results demonstrate the promising potential of the proposed approach.

A combined Approach Based on Fuzzy Classification and Contextual Region Growing to Image Segmentation

We present in this paper an image segmentation approach that combines a fuzzy semantic region classification and a context based region-growing. Input image is first over-segmented. Then, prior domain knowledge is used to perform a fuzzy classification of these regions to provide a fuzzy semantic labeling. This allows the proposed approach to operate at high level instead of using low-level features and consequently to remedy to the problem of the semantic gap. Each over-segmented region is represented by a vector giving its corresponding membership degrees to the different thematic labels and the whole image is therefore represented by a Regions Partition Matrix. The segmentation is achieved on this matrix instead of the image pixels through two main phases: focusing and propagation. The focusing aims at selecting seeds regions from which information propagation will be performed. Thepropagation phase allows to spread toward others regions and using fuzzy contextual information the needed knowledge ensuring the semantic segmentation. An application of the proposed approach on mammograms shows promising results