Automatic Image Segmentation by Dynamic Region Merging

This paper addresses the automatic image segmentation problem in a region merging style. With an initially over-segmented image, in which the many regions (or super-pixels) with homogeneous color are detected, image segmentation is performed by iteratively merging the regions according to a statistical test. There are two essential issues in a region merging algorithm: order of merging and the stopping criterion. In the proposed algorithm, these two issues are solved by a novel predicate, which is defined by the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) and the maximum likelihood criterion. Starting from an over-segmented image, neighboring regions are progressively merged if there is an evidence for merging according to this predicate. We show that the merging order follows the principle of dynamic programming. This formulates image segmentation as an inference problem, where the final segmentation is established based on the observed image. We also prove that the produced segmentation satisfies certain global properties. In addition, a faster algorithm is developed to accelerate the region merging process, which maintains a nearest neighbor graph in each iteration. Experiments on real natural images are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed dynamic region merging algorithm.Comment: 28 pages. This paper is under review in IEEE TI

Mammographic Mass Detection with Statistical Region Merging

An automatic method for detection of mammographic masses is presented which utilizes statistical region merging for segmentation (SRM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for classification. The performance of the scheme was evaluated on 36 images selected from the local database of mammograms and on 48 images taken from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM). The Az value (area under the ROC curve) for classifying each region was 0.90 for the local dataset and 0.96 for the images from DDSM. Results indicate that SRM segmentation can form part of an robust and efficient basis for analysis of mammograms

Segmentation of complex outdoor scenes

Journal ArticleA new simpler approach to image segmentation via recursive region splitting and merging is presented. Unlike other techniques the kernel of splitting is based on a generalization of a two class gradient relaxation method and merging uses a statistical analysis of variance

Image Segmentation of Cattle Muzzle Using Region Merging Statistical Technic

Making an identification system that able to assist in obtaining, recording and organizing information is the first step in developing any kind of recording system. Nowadays, many recording systems were developed with artificial markers although it has been proved that it has many limitations. Biometrics use of animals provides a solution to these restrictions. On a cattle, biometric features contained in the cattle muzzle that can be used as a pattern recognition sample. Pattern recognition methods can be used for the development of cattle identification system utilizing biometric found on the cattle muzzle using digital image processing techniques. In this study, we proposed cattle muzzle identification method using segmentation Statistical Region Merging (SRM). This method aims to identify specific patterns found on the cattle muzzle by separating the object pattern (foreground) from unnecessary information (background) This method is able to identified individual cattle based on the pattern of it muzzle. Based on our evaluation, this method can provide good performance results. This method good performance can be seen from the precision and recall : 87% and the value of ROC : 0.976. Hopefully this research can be used to help identify cattle accurately on the recording process

Bayesian statistical analysis of ground-clutter for the relative calibration of dual polarization weather radars

A new data processing methodology, based on the statistical analysis of ground-clutter echoes and aimed at investigating the stability of the weather radar relative calibration, is presented. A Bayesian classification scheme has been used to identify meteorological and/or ground-clutter echoes. The outcome is evaluated on a training dataset using statistical score indexes through the comparison with a deterministic clutter map. After discriminating the ground clutter areas, we have focused on the spatial analysis of robust and stable returns by using an automated region-merging algorithm. The temporal series of the ground-clutter statistical parameters, extracted from the spatial analysis and expressed in terms of percentile and mean values, have been used to estimate the relative clutter calibration and its uncertainty for both co-polar and differential reflectivity. The proposed methodology has been applied to a dataset collected by a C-band weather radar in southern Italy

CORTICAL BONE SEGMENTATION USING WATERSHED AND REGION MERGING BASED ON STATISTICAL FEATURES

Research on biomedical image is a subject that attracted many researchers’ interest. This is because the biomedical image could contain important information to help analyze a disease. One of the existing researches in his field uses dental panoramic radiographs image to detect osteoporosis. The analyzed area is the width of cortical bone. To analyze that area, however, we need to determine the width of the cortical bone. This requires proper segmentation on the dental panoramic radiographs image. This study proposed the integration of watershed and region merging method based on statistical features for cortical bone segmentation on dental panoramic radiographs. Watershed segmentation process was performed using gradient magnitude value from the input image. The watershed image that still has excess segmentation could be solved by region merging based on statistical features. Statistical features used in this study are mean, standard deviation, and variance. The similarity of adjacent regions is measured using weighted Euclidean distance from the statistical feature of the regions. Merging process was executed by incorporating the background regions as many as possible, while keeping the object regions from being merged. The segmentation result has succeeded in forming the contours of the cortical bone. The average value of accuracy is 93.211%, while the average value of sensitivity and specificity is 93.858% and respectively