A novel segmentation strategy based on colour channels coupling

Abstract

A segmentation method based on a physics-based model of image formation is presented in this paper. This model predicts that, in image areas of uniform reflectance, colour channels keep coupled in the sense that they are not free to take any intensity value, but they depend on the values taken by other colour channels. This paper first enumerates and analyzes a set of properties in which this coupling materializes, Next, a segmentation strategy named C3S and based on looking for violations of the coupling properties is proposed. Segmentation results for synthetic and real images are presented at the end of the paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.