Abstract

Accurate segmentation of images is one of the most important objectives in image analysis. The two conventional methods of image segmentation, region based segmentation and boundary finding, often suffer from a variety of limitations. Many methods have been proposed to overcome the limitations but the solutions tend to be problem specific. Here we present a new region growing method with the capability of finding the boundary of a relatively bright/dark region in a textured background. The method relies on a measure of contrast of the region which represents the variation of the region gray level as a function of its evolving boundary during the growing process. It helps to identify the best external boundary of the region. The application of a reverse test using a gradient measure then yields the highest gradient boundary for the region being grown. A number of experiments have been performed both on synthetic and real images to evaluate the new approach. The proposed scheme can be ca...

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