Unsupervised seed determination for a region-based color image segmentation scheme

A color image segmentation technique is presented for use in coding and/or compression of video-conferencing sequences. The proposed technique utilizes the perceptual HSI (hue, saturation, intensity) color space and incorporates an unsupervised seed determination algorithm that finds the seed pixels that are in the spatial center of the regions in the image. The algorithm employs a hierarchy system where seeds found at the highest level produce the best results. The region growing algorithm uses these seeds to grow regions by appending to each seed pixel those neighboring pixels that satisfy a certain homogeneity criterion. The technique is found to be robust and relatively computationally inexpensive. The effectiveness of the algorithm is found to be much improved over techniques used in the past