New characterizations of minimum spanning trees and of saliency maps based on quasi-flat zones

We study three representations of hierarchies of partitions: dendrograms (direct representations), saliency maps, and minimum spanning trees. We provide a new bijection between saliency maps and hierarchies based on quasi-flat zones as used in image processing and characterize saliency maps and minimum spanning trees as solutions to constrained minimization problems where the constraint is quasi-flat zones preservation. In practice, these results form a toolkit for new hierarchical methods where one can choose the most convenient representation. They also invite us to process non-image data with morphological hierarchies

Scale Space Operators on Hierarchies of Segmentations

Abstract. A hierarchy of segmentations(partitions) is a multiscale set representation of the image. This paper introduces a new set of scale space operators or transformations on the space of hierarchies of partitions. An ordering of hierarchies is proposed which is endowed by an ω-ordering based on a global energy over the classes of the hierarchy. A class of Matheron semigroups are shown to exists in this ordering of hierarchies. A second contribution is the saliency transformation which fuses a saliency function corresponding to a hierarchy, with an external function, rendering a new or transformed saliency function. The results are demonstrated on the Berkeley dataset.