An instability problem of region growing segmentation algorithms and its set median solution

Abstract

The region growing paradigm is a well known technique for image segmentation. In the first part of this work, the robustness of region growing algorithms is studied. It is shown that within a small parameter range, which leads to good segmentation results in the majority of cases, bad segmentation results may occur. Furthermore the influence of noise on segmentation results is studied. In fact, instability is a problem of region growing methods and reasons for its occurrence are discussed. In the second part of the work, a solution for this problem based on the set median concept is proposed. The set median is adopted to combine image ensembles and stability is achieved. Experimental results illustrate the performance of our approach. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.