• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.50-59
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• 2000

In this paper, a new preprocessing method is proposed to speedup the watershed-based image segmentation In the proposed method, the gradient correction values of ramp edges are calculated from the positions and width of the ramp edges using Laplacian operator, and then, unlike the conventional method in which the monoscale or multi scale gradient image is directly used as a reference iImage, the reference image is obtained by adding the threshold value to each position of the ramp edges in the monoscale gradient image And the marker image is reconstructed on the reference image by erosion By preprocessing the image for the watershed transformation in such a manner, we can reduce the oversegmentations far more than those of applying the conventional morphological filter to the simple monoscale or multiscale gradient-based reference image Thus, we can reduce the total image segmentation time by reducing the time of postprocessing of region merging, which consumes most of the processing time In the watershed-based image segmentation, Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can speedup the total image segmentation about twice than those of the conventional methods, without the loss of ramp edges and principal edges around the dense-edge region.