Gradient watersheds in morphological scale-space

Abstract

After introducing several results relating to the modification of the homotopy of gradient functions based on extrema in the base image and building on earlier results in morphological scale-space, we introduce a scale-space monotonicity theorem for regions of an image defined by watersheds of a gradient function modified to retain only the local minima or maxima of its smoothed parent image. We then illustrate the theorem with an example of the scale-space extraction of texture features from the nuclei of cervical cells.