A hierarchical image segmentation algorithm based on an observation scale

Abstract

Hierarchical image segmentation provides a region-oriented scale-space, i.e., a set of image segmentations at different detail levels in which the segmentations at finer levels are nested with respect to those at coarser levels. Most image segmentation algorithms, such as region merging algorithms, rely on a criterion for merging that does not lead to a hierarchy. In addition, for image segmentation, the tuning of the parameters can be difficult. In this work, we propose a hierarchical graph based image segmentation relying on a criterion popularized by Felzenszwalb and Huttenlocher. Quantitative and qualitative assessments of the method on Berkeley image database shows efficiency, ease of use and robustness of our method. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.