Hidden Markov measure field models for image segmentation

Parametric image segmentation consists of finding a label field that defines a partition of an image into a set of nonoverlapping regions and the parameters of the models that describe the variation of some property within each region. A new Bayesian formulation for the solution of this problem is presented, based on the key idea of using a doubly stochastic prior model for the label field, which allows one to find exact optimal estimators for both this field and the model parameters by the minimization of a differentiable function. An efficient minimization algorithm and comparisons with existing methods on synthetic images are presented, as well as examples of realistic applications to the segmentation of Magnetic Resonance volumes and to motion segmentation.