A fast algorithm for MDL-based multi-band image segmentation

We consider the problem of image segmentation and describe an algorithm that is based on the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, is fast, is applicable to multi-band images, and guarantees closed regions. We construct an objective function that, when minimized, yields a partitioning of the image into regions where the pixel values in each band of each region are described by a polynomial surface plus noise. The polynomial orders and their coefficients are determined by the algorithm. The minimization is difficult because (1) it involves a search over a very large space and (2) there is extensive computation required at each stage of the search. To address the first of these problems we use a region-merging minimization algorithm. To address the second we use an incremental polynomial regression that uses computations from the previous stage to compute results in the current stage, resulting in a significant speed up over the non-incremental technique. The segmentation result obtained is suboptimal in general but of high quality. Results on real images are shown