Multi-scale gradient magnitude watershed segmentation

Abstract

A partitioning of an nD image is defined as the watersheds of some locally computable inhomogeneity measure. Dependent on the scale of the inhomogeneity measure a coarse or fine partitioning is defined. By analysis of the structural changes (catastrophes) in the measure introduced when scale is increased, a multi-scale linking of segments can be defined. This paper describes the multi-scale linking based on recent results of the deep structure of the squared gradient field[1]. An interactive semi-automatic segmentation tool, and results on synthetic and real 3D medical images are presented.