A novel pixon-based approach for image segmentation using wavelet thresholding method

Abstract

In this paper a novel pixon-based method is proposed for image segmentation, which uses the combination of wavelet transform (WT) and the pixon concept. In our method, a wavelet thresholding technique is successfully used to smooth the image and prepare it to form the pixons. Utilizing the wavelet thresholding leads to elimination of some unnecessary details and results in a fewer pixon number, faster performance and more robustness against unwanted environmental noises. As the next step, the appropriate pixons are extracted and eventually we segment the image with the use of a hierarchical clustering method. The results of applying the proposed method on several different images indicate its better performance in image segmentation compared to the other methods. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.