Segmentation is the low-level operation concerned with partitioning images by determining disjoint and homogeneous regions or, equivalently, by finding edges or boundaries. The homogeneous regions, or the edges, are supposed to correspond to actual objects, or parts of them, within the images. Thus, in a large number of applications in image processing and computer vision, segmentation plays a fundamental role as the first step before applying to images higher-level operations such as recognition, semantic interpretation, and representation. Until very recently, attention has been focused on segmentation of gray-level images since these have been the only kind of visual information that acquisition devices were able to take and computer resources to handle. Nowadays, color imagery has definitely supplanted monochromatic information and computation power is no longer a limitation in processing large volumes of data. The attention has accordingly been focused in recent years on algorithms for segmentation of color images and various techniques, ofted borrowed from the background of gray-level image segmentation, have been proposed. This paper provides a review of methods advanced in the past few years for segmentation of color images.

A number of texture classification approaches have been developed in the past but most of these studies target graylevel textures. In this work, novel results are presented on Neural Network based classification of color textures in a very large heterogeneous database. Several different Multispectral Random Field models are used to characterize the textures. The classifying features are based on the estimated parameters of these model and functions defined on them. The approach is tested on a database of 73 different color textures classes. The advantage of utilizing color information is demonstrated by converting color textures to gray-level ones and classifying them using Grey Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) based features.