AN EFFICIENT IMAGE SEGMENTATION TECHNIQUE TO IDENTIFY TARGET AREAS FROM LARGE-SIZED MONOCHROME IMAGES

In this paper, we propose an efficient image segmentation technique for large-sized monochrome images using a hybrid approach which combines threshold and region-based techniques. First, an image is partitioned into fixed-size blocks and for each block the representative intensity is determined by averaging pixel intensities within the block. Next, the neighborhood blocks that have similar characteristics with respect to a specific threshold are merged in order to form candidate regions. Finally, those candidate regions are refined to get final target object regions by merging regions considering the spatial locality and certain criteria. We have performed experiments on images selected from various domains and showed that our technique was able to extract target object regions appropriately from most images.