Abstract

This paper presents a multiple resolution algorithm for segmenting images into regions with differing statistical behavior. In addition, an algorithm is developed for determining the number of statistically distinct regions in an image and estimating the parameters of those regions. Both algorithms use a causal Gaussian autoregressive (AR) model to describe the mean, variance and spatial correlation of the image textures. Together the algorithms may be used to perform unsupervised texture segmentation. The multiple resolution segmentation algorithm first segments images at coarse resolution and then progresses to finer resolutions until individual pixels are classified. This method results in accurate segmentations and requires significantly less computation than some previously known methods. The field containing the classification of each pixel in the image is modeled as a Markov random field (MRF). Segmentation at each resolution is then performed by maximizing the a posteriori prob...

Citations