Natural scene segmentation based on a stochastic texture region merging approach

This paper presents an approach for segmenting natural scenes based on the underlying texture characteristics using a stochastic region merging strategy. Texture region models are constructed from patch-based stochastic texture features using a texton dictionary learning approach. Finally, a stochastic region merging strategy performs the image segmentation based on texture region likelihood. Compared with other state-of-the-art texture segmentation methods, our experimental results suggest that our approach potentially can handle better highly textured regions commonly found in natural scenes, and also can be more robust to color and illumination variations.