Nonlinear Gaussian filtering approach for object segmentation

Gaussian filter kernels can be used to smooth textures for image segmentation. In so-called anisotropic diffusion techniques, the smoothing process is adapted according to the edge direction to preserve the edges. However, the segment borders obtained with this approach do not necessarily coincide with physical object contours, especially in the case of textured objects. A novel segmentation technique involving weighted Gaussian filtering is introduced. The extraction of true object masks is performed by smoothing edges due to texture and preserving true object borders. In this process, additional features such as disparity or motion are taken into account. The method presented has been successfully applied in the context of object segmentation to natural scenes and object-based disparity estimation for stereoscopic applications