Multiple-region segmentation without supervision by adaptive global maximum clustering.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new method of segmenting an image into several sets of pixels with similar intensity values called regions. A multiple-region segmentation problem is unstable because the result considerably depends on the number of regions given a priori. Therefore, one of the most important tasks in solving the problem is automatically finding the number of regions. The method we propose is able to find the reasonable number of distinct regions not only for clean images but also for noisy ones. Our method is made up of two procedures. First, we develop the adaptive global maximum clustering. In this procedure, we deal with an image histogram and automatically obtain the number of significant local maxima of the histogram. This number indicates the number of different regions in the image. Second, we derive a simple and fast calculation to segment an image composed of distinct multiple regions. Then, we split an image into multiple regions according to the previous procedure. Finally, we show the efficiency of our method by comparing it with other previous methods.