ABSTRACT
CONTENTS 5.1 Introduction........................................................................................................................103 5.2 Clustering in the Color Space ..........................................................................................106 5.3 Region Growing for Color Images .................................................................................. 111
5.3.1 Seeded Region Growing....................................................................................... 112 5.3.2 Unseeded Region Growing.................................................................................. 115
5.4 Postprocessing.................................................................................................................... 117 5.5 Shadows and Highlights in the Image Segmentation Process....................................120 5.6 Quantitative Evaluation of the Segmentation Results .................................................123 5.7 Summary.............................................................................................................................125 References.....................................................................................................................................125
In different applications of color image processing, great importance is attached to the techniques used for image segmentation. The results of the further steps of image processing depend on the segmentation quality (e.g., the object recognition and tracking, the retrieval in image databases, etc.). The goal of image segmentation is partitioning of the image into homogeneous and connected regions without using additional knowledge on objects in the image. Homogeneity of regions in color image segmentation involves colors and sometimes also color textures [1]. In the segmented image, the regions have, in contrast to single pixels, many interesting features, like shape, texture, and so forth. A human being recognizes objects in the environment using the visual system and segmenting color images.
