Automatic colour–texture image segmentation using active contours

Abstract

In this paper we propose a fully automatic segmentation method for colour/texture images. By fully automatic, we mean that the steps of region initialization and calculation of the number of regions are performed automatically by the method. The region information is formulated using a mixture of pdfs for the combination of colour and texture features. The segmentation is obtained by minimizing an energy functional combining boundary and region information, which evolves the initial region contours towards the real region boundaries and adapts the mixture parameters to the region data. The method is implemented using the level sets that permit automatic handling of topology changes and stable numerical schemes. We validate the approach using examples of synthetic and natural colour–texture image segmentation.

Keywords:

• Automatic segmentation
• Colour
• Texture
• Boundary
• Active contours

Notes

^†A segment, here, is a set of pixels that belong to one connected component; thus a region Ω _k , in the sense that we defined it in our model, may be constituted of one or several segments.