Image segmentation preserving semantic object contours by classified region merging

분류된 영역 병합에 의한 객체 원형을 보존하는 영상 분할

Since the region segmentation at high resolution contains most of viable semantic object contours in an image, the bottom-up approach for image segmentation is appropriate for the application such as MPEG-4 which needs to preserve semantic object contours. However, the conventioal region merging methods, that follow the region segmentation, have poor performance in keeping low-contrast semantic object contours. In this paper, we propose an image segmentation algorithm based on classified region merging. The algorithm pre-segments an image with a large number of small regions, and also classifies it into several classes having similar gradient characteristics. Then regions only in the same class are merged according to the boundary weakness or statisticsal similarity. The simulation result shows that the proposed image segmentation preserves semantic object contours very well even with a small number of regions.