Adaptive image region-growing

Abstract

Proposes a simple, yet general and powerful, region-growing framework for image segmentation. The region-growing process is guided by regional feature analysis; no parameter tuning or a priori knowledge about the image is required. To decide if two regions should be merged, instead of comparing the difference of region feature means with a predefined threshold, the authors adaptively assess region homogeneity from region feature distributions. This results in an algorithm that is robust with respect to various image characteristics. The merge criterion also minimizes the number of merge rejections and results in a fast region-growing process that is amenable to parallelization.