Knowledge from markers in watershed segmentation

Abstract

Due to its broad impact in many image analysis applications, the problem of image segmentation has been widely studied. However, there still does not exist any automatic segmentation procedure able to deal accurately with any kind of image. Thus semi-automatic segmentation methods may be seen as an appropriate alternative to solve the segmentation problem. Among these methods, the marker-based watershed has been successfully involved in various domains. In this algorithm, the user may locate the markers, which are used only as the initial starting positions of the regions to be segmented. We propose to base the segmentation process also on the contents of the markers through a supervised pixel classification, thus resulting in a knowledge-based watershed segmentation where the knowledge is built from the markers. Our contribution has been evaluated through some comparative tests with some state-of-the-art methods on the well-known Berkeley Segmentation Dataset. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.