Stochastic watershed hierarchies

We present a segmentation strategy which first constructs a hierarchy, i.e. a series of nested partitions. A coarser partition is obtained by merging adjacent regions in a finer partition. The strength of a contour is then measured by the level of the hierarchy for which its two adjacent regions merge. Various strategies are presented for constructing hierarchies which highlight specific features of the image. The last part shows how the hierarchies lead to a final segmentation.